lamenting the crash of my bollywood dreams

sigh. no bollywood. unless someone approaches me on the dark streets of mumbai tonight, it's a no go. and i'm not sure i'd go anywhere with anyone claiming to be a bollywood director after dark. don't worry mom and dad. so i figured out that i doesn't actually smell like incense everywhere. lots of places it smells like poo. and then there is the constant opium waft.

and now, for a brief list of what i would like to call "the culture shock chronicles" or, "erin's first 24 hours in mumbai."

1. there are probably 20 men to every 1 woman on the streets of mumbai during the day.
1.5. indian men. meh.
2. you can't get samosas in any restaurant. as if!
3. you can get samosas on the street, and they're icky. :(
4. indian people do a side-to-side head bobble to mean "yes." to me, this head bobble means, "you wanna go?!" or "you're really stupid" or "you go girlfriend." the first person i saw do this i thought maybe had some kind of nervous disorder. it's really odd when men do it.
5. the answer to "are you married?" is always, always "yes."
6. the food is ooooooohhhh soooooo goooooooood . . . except the samosas i mentioned earlier. yuch.
7. the ghettos of mumbai consist of leaning shacks lining many sidewalks of the busy streets. the people who live there have beautiful clothes. i know this because i saw them hanging to dry.

okay, that chronicle was pretty lame i guess. i can't really put into words how strange everything feels here. i have never had culture shock like this before. it's really tiresome. plus, sadly, the coolest places of mumbai are the ones in which i feel the least comfortable taking pictures. so it's going to be hard to share.

but here's a bit of sharing. indian jokes, courtesy of dave, a semi-creepy indian man who claims to be an actor but with whom, nonetheless, i would not have lunch, a drink, or even enjoy the rest of the prince of wales museum:

1. i find it really funny that when people eat bananas they never know where to look.
(okay. i don't get this joke. at all.)

2. once there were two gladiators. a rat and an elephant. they were in the ring together fighting, when the rat jumped over the elephant. suddenly all the rats in the stands stood up and cried, "get him!"
(don't get this one either.)

3. once there was an ant driving in a car. he sped through a red light and the police pulled him over. "i'm sorry officer," said the rat. "my elephant friend has been in a terrible accident and i'm on my way to donate blood for him."
(i sort of get this one, but it's not funny.)

then i told dave my pirate joke and my panda bear joke and my nachos joke and even a few elephant jokes.
he didn't get any of my jokes either. see what i mean about culture shock?

tomorrow i get on a train that i'm going to ride for 40 hours to kerala, in the south, for 30 lovely days of yoga. i suck at yoga. but i'll also be learning indian cooking. i'm good at eating, so that should balance out the yoga bit, i think.

sense and sensibility and india

margaret: have you really been to india colonel?!?
colonel brandon: indeed, i have.
margaret: what's it like?
sir john: like? hot!
colonel brandon: (leaning in, oh so sexy) the air is full of spices.

when i passed through customs at the mumbai airport last night, the air was thick with the smell of incense. it continued out to the car park and all the way to my hotel. how can it smell so strongly of incense outside? everywhere? all the time?
sigh.
i love you, alan rickman.

goal for day 1, mumbai: find bollywood and get cast as an extra.

ong-bak, the terror of muai thai! and ladies with abnormally long necks

the highlights of my week in thailand waiting for my indian visa to come through:

#1 - muai thai boxing! yummy!
while i was waiting to buy tickets, the national anthem started to play. everyone, and i mean everyone, dropped what they were doing, stood up, took off their hats and stood in absolute silent reverence until it was over. i had the same experience at a market in chaing mai later in the week. it's odd for the foreigners because we're just walking around, doing our own thing, buying tickets, eating strawberries, whatever, and suddenly, it's like we're in saved by the bell and zach morris has just yelled "freeze!" so he can run off and sneak into mr. belding's office or something. but i shouldn't compare it to something so juvenile. it was awesome.
the muai thai started off with some youngersters and a bit of puking. there was blood in the middle, and as soon as the guys face started to bleed, they rushed him off the stage and it was over. the "main event" so to speak, was pretty crap. for the last round they just stood there. no punches or anything. but i loved it. i've never seen live boxing. i may have to get season tickets. how does one do that in iowa? hmm. . . muai thai has 5 rounds of 3 minutes each with a 2 minute break in the middle of each round. you can do anything except head-butting. anything. it's brutal. you can check out videos at my www.dropshots.com/eeking site. before they fight, they do a ceremonial dance wearing flowering garlands. after they fight, they hug. aww. that is, if one of them hasn't been drug out of the ring unconscious or bleeding. but the whole atmosphere was very friendly. they would smile at each other and congratulate each other. "thank you, that was a right good blow to my groin, friend." "jolly good! thanks for busting my jaw with your foot. i haven't felt that in months!" "cheers mate!" they have british accents in my head, i suppose. plus, most of these guys weigh in at less than 120 lbs. yeah. not exactly heavy-weights. but they could kick my butt. there was a demonstration fight where guys in traditional dress came out and showed off the traditional moves of muai thai. looked like wwf to me. there's video of that too. the one thing that made me kind of uncomfortable about the whole experience, besides the fact that i was close enough to get hit by a flying tooth, was that no thai person was that close. all the ring side seats are expensive, even by western standards. so all the ring side seats were filled with westerners.
imagine you're at an iowa football game. or a laker's basketball game. or a leafs hockey game. or whatever. and the front five rows and only good seats are taken up by a bunch of frenchies. or japanese. or senegalese. and they all have way, way more money than you, which is why you can't sit in the good seats, and some of the women are dressed in an extremely culturally inappropriate, pseudo-slutty manner, and they arrive late. and they leave early. and they take photos of you while you place your bets and cheer on the team. and there is an explanation not in english every 30 minutes to explain what the heck is going on with the game. i felt really awkward.

#2 - long-necked ladies of burma
when i was little, i was reading a national geographic magazine, or something, and i saw a photo of some ladies with brass rings on their necks to make their necks longer. for my whole life i thought those ladies lived in africa. and i thought they were pretty interesting. turns out they are interesting, and they live in northern thailand, as burmese refugees. and they spend their days weaving pretty scarves to sell to tourists. and they still wear their brass rings. our tour guide told us that they wear those rings to protect themselves from tiger bites. yeah, right. in the (sort of) words of wayne, monkeys might fly out of my butt to protect me from tiger bites. i asked why men don't wear them. "because men are strong." not that strong, buddy. and what about small boys? "and if you follow me over here . . . i will avoid this question." who knows why they started wearing them. or why they still do. the little girls looked uncomfortable. but they were all proud of their long necks. and the ladies were surreal. i wanted to touch them. but instead, i took pictures.
also living at the camp with the long-necked burma ladies were the akha tribes women of northern thailand and lao. these ladies like to chew leaves all the time. this process turns their teeth black. it looks like their teeth are rotting out of their heads. the first time i saw this, i was seated next to one of these women on a bus. for 8 hours. she had a plastic bag and she kept picking her black teeth with a tooth pick, spitting red puss spit into a clear plastic bag she was holding, and smiling at me. i thought i would be sick. i thought she was picking out the remains of her teeth. now i know she was just chewing the leaves. still though. it's quite the sight.

#3 - getting my passport back from the embassy and getting out of thailand
lao kicks thailand's butt. coming from southern lao into bangkok was a loud, noisy, smelly, unhappy, grumpy-thai-people-who-hate-tourists shock. i'll be glad to get out of here for a bit, then come back into thailand, better mentally prepared, in june or july. off to india i go.

the story of the lao new year

as told to me by the novice monk, kam, whose name is pronounced with tone so as to sound like a question, as in:

Hi, my name is . . . Kam? .

Once upon a time there lived a god with four faces. He heard of a very clever boy and became jealous. So he went to the boy and said, "If you're so clever, answer me three questions in three days. If you don't answer my questions, I will cut off your head. If you answer them correctly, I will cut off my own head." They boy said, "okay then." The questions were asked of the boy and off he went to find the answers. He spent three days searching his mind and reading all his books. He could not discover the answers to the four-faced god's questions. Sad and dejected, the boy crept away into the woods to die alone for he didn't want the god to cut off his head. he sat down under a tree, in which happened to be sitting two birds. Husband and wife birds to be exact. Now it just so happens that since this boy was the most clever boy on earth, he could speak the language of the birds. So he listened as the wife bird said:

wife: Oh, I'm so hungry.

husband: Me, too. But don't worry, for tomorrow we can eat the flesh of the most clever boy on the earth.

wife: but how can that be? He is not dead yet.

husband: Yes, but he will be dead tomorrow, for the god with four faces has asked him three questions which he cannot answer and his head will be cut off tomorrow.

wife: Oh yummy! But how does he not know the answers if he's so clever?

husband: The answers are not to be found in books they are found in the heart they are questions of the soul of the world and the heart and the universe and flowers and kittens and rainbows and mick meck mock crap like that. However, I know the answers to the questions of the four-faced god. Becase I'm a bird. And nature heart heaven blah. So there. Mwaha!

wife: well then, tell me.

husband: No. It's late. It's hard to explain. I'll tell you in the morning.

wife: If you don't tell me right now, I'm going to die.

husband: Don't be like that.

wife: I swear I will! I'll die right here!

husband: Okay fine. If you're going to be that way . . .

So the husband bird told the wife bird the answers that the clever boy sought. He heard these answers where he sat and, jumping up, shouted "Whohoo!" and ran off to find the god with four faces.

"Well, shoot," exclaimed the god with four faces when he heard the clever boy's answers, knowing them to be correct. So the four-faced god was to die by his own hand. However . . .

Four-faced god: I will cut off my own head now, yes, as you are sooooooo clever, but know this . . . If you bury my head in the earth, all the plants and creatures of the earth will shrivel and die. If you throw my head in the air, the air will become toxic and smother the creatures of the earth and skies. If you put my head in the water, the waters of the earth will be poisonous and unable to be drunk and all the creatures of the seas will perish.

With this, the four-faced god cut off his own head. So the boy figured the only option was to cover the four-faced god's head in poo and send it to the heavens, returning it to earth three days a year to be cleansed with water, then sent, re-poo-covered, back to the heavens again. And so that's what he did. Thus the three day long tradition of buddha cleansing during the lao new year, and people spraying eachother with water. regardless of whether or not they are laotian and/or reading a book and/or wearing a white t-shirt and/or a girl. probably because it's so durn hot here. i'm just glad this turned out to be a poo free holiday, even though we did get pee-ed on by a monkey in a tree the other day. no joke.

the story of how erin got new tevas

it was a dark, cloudy night in lao. but the clouds were stratocumulus clouds, low the the ground, and lit by the full moon of the laotian new year. there was lightening, but no thunder. macca tried to hijack some lao beer beer bottles for 3,000 kip at another bar, open until midnight. in the four minutes it took us to be rejected from our venture, someone took my tevas as their own from the front porch of the bar. they were almost the same size. they were not the same color or pattern, an easy mistake in the dark, dark, cloudy night. i, unknowingly, put on the wrong tevas and tripped my way back to my bunglow, not discovering until i was hurrying to the boat for main land the next morning that--

1. i had the wrong tevas
2. they fit better than my old ones
3. they were in way better condition than my old ones. mine have been glued once on this trip, not all that well, and have no traction left.

or should i say, used-to-have-been-mine. i had to go. i heard from an irish girl on our bus to bangkok that an older british lady was wandering around in a stupa (lao joke) trying to figure out how she got the wrong sandals two nights ago. at least we both still have sandals. hers (mine now) may have been in better condition, but mine (hers now) were way, way cuter.

the funny thing, well, it's all funny really, is that i was going to give those sandals two more weeks and then chuck them and dish out the big bucks for some new chacos in mumbai. i have been waiting for two summers for those sandals to die so that i could justify chacos. i dont' know if i can justify the purchase now. well actually, of course i can. i need shoes to match all the awesomeness i'm buying in bangkok. right?

these boots were made for something

more pictures on the photo site: www.dropshots.com/eeking
a few comments about the pictures.

1. lao is the most bombed country in the history of bombs. america did it. not very nice, considering lao was not, well, vietnam. almost $2 million dollars was spent per day. that's per day people. on bombs raids over lao.

2. the big cement jar things. circa 200 b.c.e. not a lot is known about them, but they are thought to have been used for this cool stage-by-stage burial process. one jar for decomposition, one jar for bones, one jar for cremation, etc. very cool. but this site was bombed like crazy during the raids.

3. got homemade ice cream. i think it was chicken flavored. sigh.

4. in vang viang you can add marijuana or shrooms or opium to any pizza for $1. hmm. and they play family guy and simpsons on repeat all day in the restaurants that have couches instead of chairs.

5. vientiane, the captial, is pretty cool. there is an arch de triumphe here. the u.s. gave lao a big ol' hunk of cement to build an airport. instead, they made the victory arch. the locals call it the vertical runway. huh huh.

6. buddah park. lots of cement buddahs. took 60 years to complete, finished about 10 years ago. the big circle thing with the mouth is the hell ball. if you have a pure soul, you can enter and leave. if you don't have a pure soul, well, you can never leave and you have to live in the ball forever. i didn't know this before i went in. i am writing from the ball.

7. COOL LINGUISTIC INFORMATION!! the laotian language does not have the sound "v." the french language does not have the sound "w." laotian cities like "vientiane" and "vang viang" should be "wentiane" and "wang wiang" but those darn french came in and now laotian has acquired a "v" but only in words that would have been relevant to the french colonialists. grumble.

i'm having a beautiful time. the caves in vang viang were so amazing. i'm getting a nice farmer's tan, and a monk today told me that my pronunciation of the laotian greeting is so dead on that he thought i must speak lao. oh, seriously sir, you make me blush.

okay i must go now. lao new year is fast approaching and rich and i are going to take a long overnight bus down to the south to the 4,000 islands to celebrate in style with a beer lao in one hand and a water gun in the other. more news from bangkok probably next week.

sounds about right

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

china: food isn't all it's cracked up to be. especially after korea. i'm not so much a fan of beijing. very polluted and pushy. kunming, however, is beautiful and smells of flowers everywhere. took a two day train ride from beijing to kunming. yunnan province of china is beautiful. the city of jinghong reminded me of dirty dancing. don't know why. but it felt like maybe baby would come flying through the air at me at any moment and there might be a conga line around any given corner. china bus drivers are crazy, crazy dudes.

best story from china:

we rented bikes and rode them around jinghong one day. rode through farm fields and past corn fields full of buzzing bees. green green green. friendly farmers and a man gave me an orange. my pedal started to feel a little lose, so i pulled over to wiggle it a bit and the whole thing came off in my hand. i looked up to yell for rich to stop and caught the eyes of a woman standing on the street a few feet from me. without a word she smiled and pointed across to the other side of the street. i looked across the street and there, right in front of us, was a rolling bike repair stand. no way. cost about 10 cents to fix it up like new and we were on our way again.

lao: the kids here are super-fantastic. riding on the back of a tuk-tuk taxi thing facing the people walking along the road, all the kids give double thumbs up and wave and jump up and down at the sight of us. plus, it's getting close to new years here, and the kids are splashing water on everyone in celebration. i have yet to get soaked. met some kids at a stupa (temple thing) who played with large cockroaches for entertainment purposes. i squeaked and they were completely oblivious as to what was creeping me out. bug sqeamishness was beyond them. took a six hour boat ride from nong kiew to louang phrabang. had to get out and push for a bit. every day in lao tops the previous and every night i go to sleep feeling that the next day will be even better. i am having the time of my life. i have no best story from lao yet. it's all good. the boat trip was probably the most fantastic though. but that was yesterday. and tomorrow i'm going to go ride elephants.

check out my pictures at this site: www.dropshots.com/eeking

at your own risk though, mom and dad.

whew! sigh! gasp! i'm back!

hey dudes!

i have just a few minutes before they're going to kick me out of this place. just to let you all know, i've married a korean pop star. haha, april fools.
update:
blogger is banned in china.
hence the lack of posts.
now in lao.
lao is the most beautiful thing i've ever seen.
more later.
being kicked out.
bah!
but really, lao rocks.
please give me a shout out! i need some blog lovin!