Rattan: destroyer of worlds

Haven't updated in a while. Whoopsie.

Spent the end of last week counting all the crops that Jeff wants me to count and counting which ones are harvestable.  Went home to Chiang Mai for the weekend and feel the weird contrast of urban/rural lifestyle alternation manifest itself in what feels like a case of congestive lung.  My chest/throat are super itchy and dry, and became such only after two days in the city.  Hope it goes away before my 48-hours plus of travel home.  The kids from CMIS failed to "get off their keisters" and contact Jeff about doing the biodiversity survey with me on Saturday, so I just did it on Friday and left on Saturday morning.  I am getting so obsessed with my favorite Chiang Mai food, since the end of my journey is nigh and I am probably subconsciously panicking about never being able to taste it again, so I ate like 3 meals before noon on Saturday, walked around with Lily, back from Mae Ta, and did a packing test to see how much stuff I can fit in my hiking backpack/find out exactly how much I've accumulated.  Was sort of hopeful; got lots but of soft items composed of cloth into my hiking backpack.  Could have continued to see if my other couple of bags can fit the rest of my items but I got lazy, and also realized that a significant number of clothes were at my Mae Rim host family's house. Damn.  Well, we'll see.  No need to panic. Yet.

Rode bikes with Jordan to ImmEco, the guesthouse we stayed in our very first night here, to swim in their pool and have a beer like we did all those months ago on August 19th.  It was fun and deeply, deeply bizarre.  Also, somehow my alcohol tolerance has plummeted - one beer (I guess it was a larger bottle) and I felt embarrassingly tipsy.  Example: while riding bikes to meet up with Lauren and Lily for dinner, my bike (whose rusted tin can condition has not improved) jangled super loudly when I hit a bump and I said brilliantly "Bikey no likey."  Then went to the Walking Street where I purchased some hats that look like panda heads with mittens attached and felt sort of foolish carrying them around in a huge plastic bag, and listened to Max, whose ICRP is making and performing a Lanna guitar, play on the Walking Street like one of the countless street musicians.  Tossed probably about 6 baht into his hat. I am a huge supporter of the arts.

Monday and Tuesday at the farm were spent "beautifying" and zone managing - laying down water hyacinths and straw on soil beds, cleaning out huge messes of vines and dead leaves from the middle of beds full of pineapple and rattan, ripping up weeds from the beds along the canal, piling straw on the beds on the north side of the farm, which really means shoving them between wicked, wicked rattan plants.  I know it seems like I do a lot of talking about rattan and what a monster it is.  Really, I do.  But working with it is really just like trying to bathe a savage porcupine - the spikes end up wedged in your hands, it seems to be coming from every direction at once, etc.  Scary plant.  And pineapple, as much as I adore it, has leaves like knives, especially the leaves closest to the ground (read: the ones you have to touch/grab the most).  My hands are pretty unrecognizable at this point.

Today, Jeff had a bunch of members/organizers of NGOs and CSAs, as well as some community members over to talk about the implementation of CSA, and the ways in which knowledge of organic food can be transmitted between people in Northern Thailand.  The meeting was conducted solely in rapid-fire Thai, and while I was surprised at how much I could pick up (when Jeff speaks I can understand him really really well, but when Thai people talk to other Thai people it's SOO HARD) I always have the feeling I'm not listening right...like I should be letting the sentences flow as sentences and not try so hard to pick out and translate word by word.  Well, whatever.  Sarah's sister Pam and my host mom prepared a delicious lunch of blackbone chicken soup (same as we had first week with John from the Salsa Kitchen), spinach and tomato omelette, stir-fried vegetable, papaya, and this basil/ground pork thing called grapow or something, which is spicy and DELICIOUS.  the soup's broth was great, as always, but the thing is you make the broth with every bit of the chicken - intestines, bones, head, feet - in the pot; which is TOTALLY fine, I have eaten intestines before and don't really have an aversion to them, but Pam kept piling these strange, ominous looking organs in my little bowl of broth, some of which had a suspiciously gritty texture, and didn't do much for the old appetite.  Pretended to forget about it, and then pretended to be full.  Actually, I don't think I pretended, I think Pam and I both knew I wasn't up for it.

Beautiful, windy, sunny day here in Mae Rim.  Mornings and evenings are chilly; the bucket showers are even chillier.  Last night my cough kept me awake well past one in the morning, but whatever mai-sabai (sickness) I had is gone since between two and six-thirty I sweated a profound amount.