airport security

Amd just like that, Phuket blew it. Airport security, starting with the World's Most Vigilant X-ray Monitor, decided that I should not be allowed to carry on my nail scissors. Fuck them. I had already gone through immigration (and an earlier x-ray machine) so no way to go out and check it. Have to wait for the airline staff to get to the gate and have them check it.

In the worst kind of foreign-tourist way, I'm also sick of how bad everyone's English is here. Their mispronunciation of the words they do know are often very difficult or impossible to understand. For example, I was told by three different people that I have to wait for "satap ailine." What the fuck is satap? I ask and they are unable to come up with a different word, describe what it is, or anything. My best guess now is that they mean "staff." Waiters and taxi drivers also don't understand enough English to understand orders. For example I just ordered a sausage egg and cheese sandwich on a baguette from a shitty cafe in the airport. What I got was a bacon and cheese sandwich on a bagel, which was on the menu but not even that close to what I wanted. The guy at my hostel in Kata and I took like 15 minutes to have the following conversation:

Me: can I get a taxi to the ferry tomorrow morning? Should I call one now?
Him: yes, and let me call one for you.

Pakistan works much, much better than this place despite being poorer and not having goddamn electricity.

These are small complaints in the scheme of things and really I'm just whining. Bah.

Now I'm listening to A Love Supreme in my seat on the plane and breathing deeply. Everything is awesome. 

redemption

Phuket redeemed itself in a big way last night. After spending the day on Phi Phi, which was lovely and I wish I'd spent more time there, I relocated to Patong, the main party town on the island. This was triply good. One, the place I stayed was friendlier than in Kata. Two, the guy recommended a restaurant for dinner that was the best meal I had in Thailand: fried kale and crispy pork and yummy pad thai and a beer for $4. Three, after wandering around the sensory overload that is the main drag, a woman asked me to take a pic of her and her group. I happily obliged and then asked where they were from. They said Serbia. I said where are you going and they said the beach. I said mind if I join you? They said sure. Hey presto, NYE friends!

The beach was packed, bumpin music, hundreds of Chinese lanterns floating into the sky, beer and Serbian moonshine, a thirty-second countdown, silly string, fireworks, a grin on my face. Happy. Plus I'll get some good recommendations for my trip with M&D in March.

On to Singapore. 

the sympathizer

Started slow, nearly gave up about a third in. Glad I didn't. My objections to the first part -- where's this all going, why does the format of a written confession seem so forced, or maybe so half-assed -- were satisfied by the end. Not a Great Book but I can see why it won the Pulitzer.

And man it's good to read books by people of color about themselves and their stories. White consciousness of the Vietnam War is, obviously, profoundly limited. Mine being no exception. So this book was an education, too. 

phuket cont'd

My first Thai massage was a disappointment. Mediocre. Felt like the woman knew the steps to take but not why she was taking them or what they were supposed to do. Oh well it was only $8-9, standard price here. 

I've never been around such open prostitution before. Might have been solicited before but I can't remember a specific event. It's gross here: old white men walking hand in hand down the street or on the beach with young Thai girls. And women who perch at bars and call out to you to come buy them a drink. Easy enough to ignore, but I walked around the bar street in the next town over last night and didn't go in anywhere because any place that looked half-appealing also looked like a place where I'd get hassled all night as a single dude. It's kind of a funny gender reversal, actually. A small taste of what it must be like to be a solo woman in a bar. 

I'm now debating whether to go out. Should eat dinner at least, but do I want to haul ass up to the social town or call it an early night? Plan tomorrow is to get up early and take the ferry to Phi Phi Island, which is supposed to be gorgeous and much less built up than Phuket. 

phuket

On the 27th, at my old friend AK's suggestion, I just hauled ass out to the airport at 10pm. Once there, I eventually found the one Thai Airways staffer -- same guy who'd taken my number the night before -- and found out that there would be no flight that night. This after calling about six times earlier in the day and being told "six or seven hours" until the plane was ready. So instead I went to the ticket office and booked myself on Qatar. Twelve hours and a stopover in Qatar's surrealist airport later, and 36 hours than I was meant to arrive, I landed in Bangkok.

I'm typing this on my phone so the rest of the entry will be a series of abbreviated observations and experiences. 

Suvarnabhumi Airport is efficient. Immigration line was long but clipped along, I bought a local SIM (with unlimited internet!) for about eight bucks at a kiosk, and got in a metered taxi. 

In Bangkok my hostel was adequate. I'm coming to the end of the period in my life where budget-consciousness drives vacation decisions. I could have afforded a more expensive plane ticket to places where staying is cheaper, for example. But I went with the cheapest possible ticket. 

My dinner in Bangkok was eh. Place was hyped and promising: a dive specializing in papaya salad with many configurations. I got it with fried catfish. Super hot, pretty tasty, that's about it. Then I went and had a very expensive glass of nice single malt scotch on the 37th floor of a hotel overlooking the city on an open-air balcony. Talked to a couple of young Thai, one a lawyer for UNHCR and the other an educator who'd just finished his dissertation on pedagogy of the Thai language. 

It is nice to be in a country that is not sexually repressed. All the waiters in my restaurant in Bangkok were women; unthinkable in Pakistan. In fact that's also true of the place I'm in right now. People are comfortable with skin. 

Missed out on a good day of tourism in Bangkok but made solid use of the half day I did have by going to the Wat Pho, a big temple complex centered around a massive reclining golden Buddha. It was rad, although it gave of the impression of having been almost designed for maximum tourist interest. It's still a working temple (and massage school) so that thought feels a bit disrespectful. But it's unavoidable. If you were designing "perfect place for western tourists to feel like they were seeing something exotic but still comfortable" you might come up with Wat Pho. 

Phuket tourists are at least 80% Russian. Most of these seem to be young couples, many with babies. This was a surprise, and also slightly disappointing from a solo-traveler perspective. Ah well, more time for reading. 

The place I picked to stay is a bit dead at night. One more night here but I'm relocating to the party beach town for NYE. 

I had my first Thai pad thai last night. Just finished a lunch of som tum (papaya and dried shrimp salad) and roast duck curry. Tasty. 

Southeast Asian beer is all of the piss variety.

Kata Beach, where I'm staying, is in fact really nice. The beach I mean. Got there around 10:45 this morning and it was populated but not quite crowded. Swam a bit, lay in the sun, moved to the shade, read a bit, swam a bit more, lay in the sun a bit more. A lovely way to spend several hours. 

It will probably rain later. My plan during that time is to read, exercise a bit in my room, and get a massage. 

Hurray vacation!

alone

My maiden voyage to Southeast Asia did not get off to the smoothest start. In fact, it has not yet started. After an intermittently fun, stressful, and strange Christmas Eve/Day/Boxing Day, I got to the airport around 9:45 last night to check in for my flight. The computer system had crashed so they were checking everyone in by hand. This means that everyone's boarding pass last night was literally handwritten in pen on a blank Thai Airways ticket, and that luggage was tagged by hand as well. Around 12:30 AM, an hour after our scheduled departure, we boarded. And sat. And sat. I mostly tried, occasionally successfully, to sleep. At about 3 the cabin crew gave a little cheer and announced that the mechanical problem that had kept us on the ground was fixed. Thirty minutes later -- three hours after we'd boarded -- the pilot came on the intercom to announce that we would have to deplane and try again tomorrow.

Pakistan is not the most organized country. Going back through immigration was fine, but then there were just two guys making arrangements with all 300 passengers to either stay in a hotel or write down a phone number to be reached at tomorrow when the plane was ready to fly. I wanted to go home, so I pushed my near the front of the scrum and gave the guy my number. Arrived back at my place at 4:30 and passed out, but not before making sure the ringer was on. 

Woke up at 10:30 or so and texted SRB that I had not yet managed to skip town. She invited me to hang out with her until her flight out, to Bahrain. She's going to visit her ex-boyfriend, with whom she moved to Bahrain earlier this year before seeing a vision of her future with him and deciding to get out. They'd really only just broken up when we met in October; she moved back here a little before I arrived. We talked about this trip last week and about the status of our relationship with each other. No conclusion reached, except that neither of us particularly wants to be in a relationship but both of us really like each other and spending time together. Her going to visit her ex is her business, and I'm about to be a solo traveler. But, as I told her, I like her well enough to be a little jealous already, and that feels disorienting and weird. What am I doing allowing myself to become invested emotionally in a person I just met and whose future in the place I've just adopted as my home for the next two years is unclear beyond the next five months? There's a real chance she'll just have to leave for visa reasons in April or May or something. 

We'd continued that conversation last night, and it's intense and confusing for both of us, I think, to be in this position. We're both certainly freaked out that we spend so much time together, a fact compounded recently by being among the few people in our circles left in town for Christmas. 

Feeling grumpy and tired and weird about the idea of sitting with her for an hour and a half while she waited to visit her ex, I declined her invitation and wished her a smooth trip. And then I went to the bank to pay my electrical bill, which came today and which I have the opportunity to pay on time only because my flight was cancelled last night. It was in this state of mind that I scrolled through Facebook at the bank while waiting for my number to be called. And came across a picture of CZ with her arm around an old peripheral friend in DC. I unfollowed her right after we broke up so this was from his timeline. Not the best moment to discover that she is dating a person I knew and liked. 

It hit me all at once how alone I am. Talking to the fam on Christmas Day was great, and we should all offer thanks at the altar of Skype and high-speed internet, but I miss them a lot and I missed being home (well, in CT) a lot on Christmas Day in particular. My closest friend here is someone I'm also becoming romantically involved with, and she's on her way to visit her ex. There is no one in second place with whom I could speak. And the last woman I was in love with, with whom I harbored admittedly dwindling dreams of getting back together at some nebulous point in the future, is smiling into the camera at someone else's Christmas, with someone else's arm around her waist.

TLDR: I feel really lonely right now.

finishing

The last several weeks have included a roller coaster of a concept note. Don't feel like going through the whole narrative but basically I had misgivings about it from the beginning, then struggled to get coherence in the first cut, then after the second cut tried and succeeded in getting my boss to pump the brakes and say let's try again next year despite his powerful political motivation to proceed, then learning the deadline had been extended and we had to do the best we could with basically two extra days, then organizing an emergency meeting to try to bring the missing coherence and basically failing, then working late several nights in a row to try to get it to some semblance of non-embarrassing shape.

And I did it. Just now, I sent a pre-final draft to London that will not essentially be us throwing egg on our own faces. Among all the challenges and constant learning, it's nice to do something that I'm good at and comfortable with, and cleaning and clearing up language is one such thing. A core competency.

At the same time, the whole process was a learning experience for me. There are going to be serious growing pains in getting the agencies here to work -- and, more difficult, think -- together. Some of the things I tried this time around I will abandon next time, and that's useful. 

shuffling

Am spending more and more time with SRB. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I really like her: she's cool and interesting and really, really independent, and she's curious and open. On the other hand, part of why we spend so much time together is simple proximity. She lives literally one block away, closer than anyone else I know by a good measure (except, obviously, her roommate, who is also cool). So I wonder what I'm missing out on by taking an easy path some of the time, and not having to work harder or make more of an effort or plan more to spend time with a wider group. After all, it's only been two months.

Don't want to oversell the situation, it's not like I've stopped doing stuff with other people or getting invited to stuff independently of her. Although I will say, at the Christmas Ball last Friday (more on that in a second) three separate people asked if we were together, and one asked if it was okay to still invite me to stuff independently of her (!!!). It is, of course, and we are not "together." We are in the same circle, more or less, so we'd end up doing a lot of the same things and going to the same parties regardless, so that's a bit of a moot point. She and I talked about expectations a little while ago and we both agreed that we're not ready to be in a relationship. Twofold solution: (1) keep planning and inviting more people to do stuff, and (2) have another frank discussion about what's happening.

TLDR: It's notable that I found someone I really like so quickly, and it's notable that a part of me is concerned about that.

Last Friday was the British High Commission Polar Express Ball. A black-tie affair, so I finally had an excuse to commission and wear a tux. The fit turned out really great, got several compliments, most importantly from guys who'd gotten tuxes made elsewhere and were envious. Only issue was the tie, which was a velcro affair and drooped rather embarrassingly. I took it off as soon as the dancing started. Need a proper black silk tie and a proper linen pocket square and I'll be golden the next time I need to do something formal.

The party was a little weird to start -- we arrived too early -- but ended up being fun. Much dancing, which is basically the only thing that matters at a party like that. Ended up at a good table, so dinner conversation was good.

The weekend was relaxing. Spent most of it, as aforementioned, with SRB. Yesterday afternoon played ultimate, which was fun except when I got clocked in the back of the head by my new friend and erstwhile Polar Express Ball dinner companion EM. Unintentional on his part: we were both going up for a disc and he swung his arm around and I went down. Slight headache for about five minutes but then felt okay, and I feel totally fine today. If I'd felt worse today I might have gone to the doctor.

Now, to the topic of today's post: shuffling. Shuffling schedules and tasks, to be specific. Our senior management team and a few senior managers from the other agencies spend last Wednesday to Friday in a leadership training. This was fine: trainings like that are only as good as the trainers and we had good ones. But AI had not given us permission to drop or put off other stuff. So we had to push meetings around, work late, and work over the weekend to make up for the 24 hours we spent away from our desks. That is...not ideal. If I am ever in a position to send my employees to a training, I like to think I will give them the space to take advantage of it without stressing overmuch about their day jobs.

One of the tasks that we were not allowed to kill last week, despite a concerted team effort on the part of myself and the two education advisers, is a proposal to the Brits that I may have mentioned previously. It's not good enough as it stands, and there will be another opportunity to apply later next year. So we could put it off. But AI didn't want to because it's politically difficult for us to do so: the narrative for the other agencies involved will be "AKF isn't pulling its weight, why did they do this to us? we could have just applied ourselves." Regardless of whether that's fair or not. We'd convinced him anyway, but then the Brits extended the deadline and so again, today, there was shuffling. I cleared my schedule, and got a bunch of other senior people to clear their schedules (with AI's help in a couple of cases) so that we could break down what we have and make it better, together. The draft is with a couple of colleagues in Karachi now. Will find out tomorrow whether it was worth trying again on such incredibly short notice. Fingers crossed.

lahore

Lahore: Much party, very food, such historical, wow. Went down with RF and his colleague MH and colleague's wife MR on Friday morning, in their car and with a driver they hired. It's about a 4.5-hour trip door-to-door if you don't stop. But for people here that is a journey, so we took a couple of lengthy breaks. The contrast with the States is funny: For most of the country 4.5 hours is a reasonably quick trip, only worth stopping if you're with kids, you're tired, or you're really not in a hurry.

Having a driver becomes worth it in Lahore itself, where traffic is insane and driving is really stressful.

Lahoris party really hard: we were out on Friday night until 7 AM the following morning. Saturday was mildly rough, but we got it together because my colleague who is in charge of our conservation projects there had agreed to take us on a tour. Hangover forgotten immediately after we met up with him, it was so amazing. The Lahore Fort (featuring the world's largest picture wall), the Summer Palace, the Wazir Khan Mosque and the Shahi Hammam: all fabulous in their own right, and fascinating and encouraging to visit in their varying stages of renaissance, with the guy who's leading the effort. We are doing it right: documenting in exceptional detail, recreating traditional modes of construction and decoration, and only then painstakingly restoring the beautiful structures, mosaics, frescoes, stonework, etc. The Shahi Hammam is the only project that's complete so far and we just won an award from UNESCO this year for our work on it. A good reminder that my job can be very cool.

Saturday night we ate on top of a building overlooking the fourth-largest mosque in the world and a big swath of the city. It was the prophet's (PBUH) birthday on Monday, so many buildings here were draped in lights. Made for a spectacular view. Then we went home and went to bed to recover from the night before. RF and I occupied a single futon mattress with separate duvets on the floor of the empty second-floor apartment of MR's aunt's house. Very basic accommodations but perfectly comfortable, and free. And she cooked a balls-out desi dinner for us on Friday that was very good.

Sunday we took it easy in the morning/mid-day. RF and I walked over to a local restaurant with another colleague of his and ordered what turned out to be absolutely delicious desi breakfast of fried bread and some kind of chickpea thing and tea. Then we caught a taxi to the polo grounds for the birthday party of one of the guys from the earlier half of Friday. RF wanted to bring him a bottle of vodka as a present. A motley crew of fashion-forward Lahori elites and cousins, nieces and nephews were sitting and standing around some blankets with a picnic laid out that would look familiar to any outdoor event-goer in the States. A high-school event-goer, as the vodka was in plastic water bottles. At one point they wanted to decant another bottle of vodka into a water bottle. As the spare gora, I went along for cover. Racial profiling here is universal.

As we were leaving the group to walk to the car for the decanting, a middle-aged guy with a nice jacket and a huge Hermes belt buckle arrived and exchanged some words with the birthday boy. The woman we were walking with translated for me: That's the chief of police, and he says make sure you don't get seen and actually just leave the parking lot to do it. Yes. So we bought a bottle of water at a snack stand, went into the parking lot, got in the car, and I sat in the back while birthday boy decanted in the front seat. Then out we got and back through the gates like it ain't no thang. All in all a hilarious high-school/college experience. I am 30.

We left soon after because we didn't to be late for the day's main event. After reuniting with MH and MR, we drove (were driven) out to Wagah, the only legal border crossing between Pakistan and India, to see the ceremonial closing of the gates. The ceremony is completely bananas. Soldiers in outrageous get-ups do a crazy series of high-stepping marches and fist-shaking and screaming at the Indian guards on the other side of the gates, while hype men with drums get the crowd chanting patriotic slogans ("Pakistan! Zindabad!" or "Long live Pakistan" being one). It goes without saying but the Indian guards are doing just as much high-stepping and fist shaking. A lot of it is truly mirrored, for example, when pairs of guards take turns flexing and making scary faces at their paired counterparts. Then they lower the flags while everyone goes nuts and that's it. Apparently, the rest of the day the guards all hang out because they have nothing to do.

Totally worth the 1.5 or 2-hour round trip for the 15-minute event. RF and I were positive celebrities as basically the only white people (goree, singular gora) there. People literally came over to us and asked to take selfies. RF obliged, I did not. Not sure why not, because what's the harm? Anyway that's a funny experience. I'm less of a novelty in the part of Islamabad I occupy.

Sunday night we partied again with the crew from earlier Friday/polo grounds birthday party. It was really fun: The most famous guy in the group hosted about 12-15 people in his house (he lives in a suite in his parents' house; very common here; Mom and Dad were out of town so, as one of the other guys said, "The mice come out to play"), and we just danced and laughed and drank for six hours. At one point our host started tearing people's shirts off. This was a predominantly gay group, and so it was inevitable that this should also happen to me. Didn't want them ripping my shirt, so I said he could rip one of his shirts off me. He took me into his room, dug through some things, and gave me a shirt to put on. Then we went outside and to the middle of the dancing, and he ripped it in half. I'm telling this story mainly because I found out the next day that the shirt had cost $400. This is...a different scene from any I'm used to. Closest analogue is the TB rich-middle-aged-gay-men scene in DC but these guys are richer and generally inherited their money.

Monday we woke up fit as fiddles, went back to the desi breakfast place, read the paper, waited for the fog to clear so we could get on the road, and drove back to Islamabad.

What a weekend.

the trespasser

French's prose is strong, Antoinette Conway is a great take on the hard boiled homicide detective, and the plot rips along. Not the greatest whodunit but a fun read.

flight 661

http://www.dawn.com/news/1301042/pia-flight-pk-661-crashes-enroute-to-islamabad

A plane just crashed coming into Islamabad from Chitral. It was about ten minutes out from the airport, just on the other side of the Margallas. A search-and-rescue team from FOCUS should be there by now. I didn't know any of the passengers personally but some of my colleagues did and have taken this hard. Not least because at least seven of the people on board were en route at our invitation, either for a dinner tonight or for an all-day workshop planned for tomorrow. I am not one to take things personally when they're clearly outside my control but I recognize that it's natural for many people to feel guilt when something like this happens. Can't even imagine how they're feeling. No matter which way you look at it, it's awful. Heart's out to the families of the 47 passengers and crew.

It remains to be seen whether poor visibility was the cause of the crash but for what it's worth I couldn't see the hills outside my window today at all. Not even the faintest outline. This is the worst haze people have seen here in at least four years. Makes me glad for the helicopter pilots' extreme cautiousness.

Damn.

trump's america

Cross-posted, ish, from FB:

I woke this morning to the news that the Dakota Access Pipeline had been halted, and that Comet Ping Pong, which is owned by and employs friends of mine, had been assaulted by a stupid young white man because of a lunatic right-wing internet conspiracy theory.

Maybe it's partly because I'm sick, but I feel very emotional about the victory of the Standing Rock Sioux and all the water protectors. Their courage and passion are an inspiration in the least corny sense of that word.

Meanwhile, the attack on Comet is both frightening and relieving, in that no one was physically hurt.

The undeniable power of nonviolent resistance and the willingness of people to endure brutal violence, and the threat posed by the mainstreaming of the darkest corners of the racist, sexist, unhinged internet right wing, all at once.

EDIT: I am weeping, tears are pouring down my face, in gratitude and admiration for the courage of this 13-year-old child.