Item From the Past: Some Admirable Lateral Thinking

I've posted before about Kanchanaburi, Thailand, but not the view from the Bridge on the River Kwai.

Fiction has a way, of course, of fictionalizing things. According to the remarkable web site the Man in Seat Sixty-One, "there is a small technical problem with the Bridge on the River Kwai: It crosses a river all right, but not the River Kwai! Pierre Boulle, who wrote the original book, had never been there. He knew that the 'death railway' ran parallel to the River Kwae for many miles, and assumed that it was the Kwae which it crossed just north of Kanchanaburi. He was wrong -- it actually crosses the Mae Khlung.

"When David Lean's blockbuster came out, the Thais faced something of a problem. Thousands of tourists flocked to see the bridge over the River Kwae, and they hadn't got one; all they had was a bridge over the Mae Khlung. So, with admirable lateral thinking, they renamed the river. The Mae Khlung is now the Kwae Yai ('Big Kwae') for several miles north of the confluence with the Kwae Noi ('Little Kwae'), including the bit under the bridge."

Finally, any time is a good time to watch this clip.

CP Shrimp Wonton Soup

CP Shrimp Wonton Soup comes frozen in small black plastic bowls holding five wontons per bowl, with a net weight of 5.1 oz. It got me thinking. Did I ever have a wonton growing up? We went to Chinese restaurants occasionally, but I don't ever remember having one until I was a regular at Wong's, a small cafeteria-style place in Nashville in the early '80s. That place had great fried wontons.

The soup we ate last week, acquired at a warehouse store, wasn't Chinese, but Thai. Carried to our table here in the heart of North America by the astonishing infrastructure of international trade in our time, even if that means a $12.2 billion US trade deficit with Thailand (in 2009, down $2.3 billion from 2008). The CP in the name stands for Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Co. Ltd., headquartered in Amphur Muang in the Gulf of Thailand coastal province of Samut Sakorn. Charoen Pokphand is the General Mills of Thailand, apparently -- or maybe the Thai Tyson, but anyway a major Southeast Asian food conglomerate.

The label says that the wontons contain farm-raised shrimp, going as far to specify the Latin name, Litopenaeus vannamei, formerly Penaeus vannamei, or Pacific white shrimp, or whiteleg shrimp, or the more mellifluous name in French, Crevette pattes blanches. The FAO page on this species has more information about the shrimp than anyone but aquaculturists are likely to want, but I did note a few things. Native to Central and South America, the creature was first spawned in tanks in Florida in the 1970s, and production has skyrocketed since then. It's a species that breeds well in captivity.

On the road from Bangkok to the Gulf coast, I remember seeing enormous manmade ponds near the road. Shrimp farms, I was told.

"Thailand's prawn harvest yields 500,000-550,000 tonnes annually, accounting for 28 percent of the world's prawn production," notes MCOT, "Thailand's Best TV Web Site," in a recent article. "Ninety-nine percent of shrimp farming in the country is for whiteleg shrimps, while the other 1 percent is for black tiger prawns. Over 90 percent of Thailand's shrimp produce is for export in the form of refrigerated, frozen and processed prawns."

Frozen -- that's what we had. Yuriko said she checked in the store to make sure they weren't made in China, which she didn't want to buy. "But why not?" I asked. "Heavy metals would be no extra charge."

Preparation is easy, the better to appeal to the North American market: add water to the fill line inside the bowl, then nuke it for three minutes. That's it. I wasn't expecting much from frozen soup shipped across the Pacific that ultimately spent time in my microwave oven, but I was surprised. CP Shrimp Wonton Soup turned out to be as good as anything I've ever had in a Thai restaurant, including those in Thailand. Everyone else in the house thought so too, and we went through all of it in a couple of days.

Item From the Past: Wat Yai Chai Mongkol

Here's hoping the Thais find political stability at long last, but not at the cost of their liberty. Too much of the former without the latter equals Burma, just to name a neighbor for whom government is a cruel master.

Speaking of Burma, 16 years ago this month we visited Ayutthaya Historic Park, Thailand. The connection might not be obvious unless you know that in 1767, a Burmese army destroyed the city of Ayutthaya, which marked the end of the Siamese kingdom whose capital had been Ayutthaya. It was a teeming and wealthy place in its heyday, holding sway over much of southeast Asia for centuries.

Its ruins endure, helped along by restoration in the late 20th century. It's a fairly large place with much to see under the tropical sun. Perhaps that's why Buddha reclines.

Remarkably, buddha-images.com more-or-less agrees with me, asserting that "if supporting the head of the Buddha, the image denotes that the Buddha is resting." Otherwise, he's "entered into nirvana." Since my knowledge of Buddhist iconography is pretty much on par with my understanding of particle physics, I'll leave it at that. In any case, that's the reclining Buddha at Wat Yai Chai Mongkol in Ayutthaya.

Discovery Thailand says, "Built by King U Thong (Ayutthaya’s first ruler) in 1357, the temple... has a large chedi that dominates the skyline. The chedi was built in 1592 to celebrate King Naresuan’s single-handed defeat of the then Burmese Crown Prince after an elephant-back duel.

"The size of the chedi was intended to match that of Phu Khao Thong – a Pagoda purportedly built by the Burmese which is visible in the distance from the temple."

The Thais and the Burmese have long been mixing it up, it seems. It's what neighbors do (sometimes with war elephants, no less). Chedi is Thai for stupa, and the one at Wat Yai Chai Mongkol is impressive indeed, whether or not it was in competition with a Burmese edifice.

More pics of the temple, and more recent ones, are at this site.

From May to June: Items from the Past

The May-June junction came on a weekend this year, and both days were pleasantly clear and warm (unlike the bizarre chill of last Tuesday). It was also a pleasant weekend in other ways, mostly in the company of my family, at home or within a few miles of it. But some years have found me further away. I never thought about it before, but they all involved heavy rain:

June 1, 1983.

We woke fairly earlier and assembled in the common area for a breakfast of egg, ham, toast, canned spaghetti and tea. I sat next to an old German and a young one, and near the English schoolboys, but the Australian was missing. Soon I headed into town and spent the rest of the day by myself, wandering around Cambridge.

Early in the day, I visited a sizable bookstore, then King’s College Chapel and its magnificent ceilings & intricate stonework & stained glass. It was partly cloudy and cool, so I walked a long way along the banks of the River Cam, eying the famous flatboats on the river and the ducks on the shore, which seemed to be everywhere, feeding on a harvest of earthworms that washed up in last night’s tremendous thunderstorm.

June 1, 1994.

Yesterday we were supposed to leave early from Bangkok, but Olivi Travel made a mistake, booking us to leave for Ko Samet this morning. We pointed this out, and they arranged for us to take a bus leaving in mid-morning. Along the highway SE of Bangkok there seemed to be an endless variety of warehouse space, but then we turned onto a smaller road, passing agricultural land, but also a surprising amount of unused land – bumpy green hilly tracts.

So today we are on Ko Samet, a smallish island in the Gulf of Thailand, not to be confused with Ko Samui, which I’ve read sports a much larger tourist infrastructure. Our bungalow is partway up a hill from the beach, a little wooden shack, really, but the bed is fairly comfortable and has its own mosquito net, an essential item in these parts. Last night a large storm blew through, rattling the walls, tapping heavily on the roof and whooshing the trees around the shack in various directions.

At the moment, I’m sitting under the trees at the shore of Ao Phai, one of the island’s beaches. The sand is very fine and very white. Yuriko is bobbing up and down out in the surf. There’s a wind from the sea strong enough to cool me & drive away most of the biting insects while I read short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

May 31, 2002

Our last full day in Montreal was punctuated by thunderstorms. We sought shelter in various places around the Quartier Latin that morning, including Café Croissant de Lune on Rue St. Denis, for a fine breakfast, and various parts of the University of Montreal.

By afternoon, we went to St. Joseph’s Oratory, which includes a large basilica and some other religious buildings set on a hill some miles from Old Montreal. Its founder, one Brother Andre, was reputed to be a healer, a circumstance attested by piles of crutches near his tomb. The view of Montreal from the steps of the basilica was grand, but the interior (completed in 1960) was not — it was austere enough to pass for some kind of Protestant church. My favorite part of the complex was a small museum devoted to nativity scenes, displaying scores of them from dozens of countries, made from an amazing variety of materials, including a chocolate one.

Item from the Past: July Fourth on the Malaysian Peninsula

On July 4 [1994] we boarded a train in Bangkok, which pulled out at 15:15 and headed south, through the hilly lushness and small towns on the Isthmus of Kra, a land feature that fascinated me on maps as far back as elementary school (along with Sulawesi, which I knew as the Celebes). It’s a long isthmus, and the train wasn’t especially fast, so we rolled on into the night.

Next to us was a girl freshly out of Berkeley, Kara, who had a lot to say about where she’d been, e.g., “China sucked!” We sympathized. She was one of the few other North Americans I’ve met in recent weeks. Plenty of Europeans, plenty of Australians, but not so many from my continent -- too bad, southeast Asia is worth the trip.

The berths were simple but reasonably comfortable, and the air conditioning worked fairly well, unlike during the run up to Chang Mai a few weeks ago. We arrived at the frontier with Malaysia just after waking up, and spent a while outside the train on the formalities of border-crossing.

We arrived at Butterworth more or less on time, and caught an enormous car ferry, mostly empty, for the short hop to Penang Island. Once on the island, we paid a tricycle rickshaw man RM$4 -- $3 fare, $1 tip -- to take us to the New China Hotel. He was the picture of a rickshaw man: wiry, deep brown, Chinese. The New China, a charming dump, distinctly risky in terms of fire (though we had a large window for escape), was cheap and well-located in Georgetown. Wooden floors, high ceilings, a flapping ceiling fan. Squat toilets, cold showers, and an indifferent-looking bar downstairs. All for RM$17.60 a night.

Georgetown turned out to be a low-rise, whitewashed, somewhat seedy town, good for walking after the heat of the day died down, and early in the morning. I took a couple of good walks before Yuriko woke. Over the next few days took in Ft. Cornwallis (nice clocktower), wandered around the Komtar Mall, saw the Kek Lok Sri temple, climbing its pagoda, swam at Batu Ferringhi beach, and rode the cable railway up Penang Hill. To escape the heat, we saw Heaven and Earth, an Oliver Stone failure, and the moderately funny Maverick, both subtitled in Bahasa Malaysia.

NoodleClips

Mild day, not excessively busy. Didn’t have a $5 Dominick’s pizza today, in spite of what I wrote yesterday. Lilly said she didn’t want any. Even at seven, you sometimes burn out on things.

Visited two new retail concepts lately, new in the sense that I’d never tried them, and in a more global sense. They’re both growing young chains. First, noodles. Then hair. Despite similarities in shape between those things, the shops were very different.

Ann and I had lunch at Noodles & Co. in Arlington Heights, Ill., a few weeks ago. The place was wombish. Pastel walls, soft brown tables, soft track lighting, an enclosing—but not claustrophobic—interior space that happened to be a noodle-focused restaurant.

Lunch there was the very last lagniappe of my former job at Real Estate Media. In early March (see the March 2-4 postings), I went to Grand Rapids for a retail conference, and for a while listened to a fellow from Noodles & Co. I can’t remember a thing he said now. But at the end of his presentation, he gave members of his small audience postcard-sized gift certificates for a free entrée at the restaurant chain.

All along the Noodles & Co. walls were photos with black frames. Each one, large and glossy and colorful, had food or food establishment as a subject: an open-air market in Seattle, baskets of peppers in Bangkok. The food equivalent of wildlife shots that lull one into thinking that the wilderness is full of picturesque creatures at every turn.

Speaking of Thailand, I had the pad thai, which was really pretty good. I ordered macaroni and cheese for Ann, but she preferred to eat from my plate, so I ended up eating most of hers. It was several cuts above the boxed variety, as you might expect.

On my birthday I went by myself to a place called SportClips for a haircut. Sam the barber downtown is just a little far away now, and besides, I wrote an article about SportClips a few months ago, so I decided to give it a try.

The concept assumes that men and boys think about sports pretty much all the time, or would if they could. The place has tiles like a locker room, sports photos and memorabilia, and one TV for each of half a dozen barber chairs, tuned into one of the ESPNs. Seemed like overkill to me. Enough to have one big TV off in the corner, broadcasting whatever sport is in season.

A young woman cut my hair. All the staff were young women, and if you read between the lines at SportClips web site, the chain seems to recruit them from beauty parlor jobs with the promise of somewhat better working conditions and pay, and especially the prospect of customers who are easy to please, that is, men and boys. I think they’re on to something.

My haircutter wasn’t bad, but she was noticeably ham-handed compared to Sam the barber. After the cut, however, was the shampoo, and that was worth the price alone (about $15 with tip, incidentally). More barber shops ought to do that.

Item From the Past: The Death Railway

This item is from 11 years ago, around my 33rd birthday.

At 10 in the morning on June 10 [1994] we caught a minibus to Kanchanaburi. We rented a bamboo hut overlooking the banks of the River Kwai for all of 100 baht per night (about $4), complete with mosquito screens. No mossies got in by night, but a bird lives somewhere in the walls. That was our best guess, anyway, since we never did see it. A few times an hour, it would sing, “uh-oh,” “uh-oh,” “uh-oh,” “uh-oh.” That’s what I heard. Yuriko heard “aho,” “aho,” “aho,” “aho,” which means “stupid” in Japanese.

Late in the afternoon of the first day we walked to the Bridge On the River Kwai -- luckily under cloudy skies, though still hot. It’s a fine railroad bridge, rebuild after the war, unexceptional but for a bloody past and the gloss of Hollywood. You can walk across it. We did. There are essentially two planks alongside the rails and nothing much on the sides, so it’s best not to stumble. It isn’t a high bridge, but the river is still far enough down to do some damage after a freefall. Every 20 feet or so there are places to stand away from the tracks in case you’re on the Bridge when a train comes to cross, but nothing came along while we were on the Bridge. Since the line doesn’t go into Burma anymore, traffic is fairly low.

Near the Bridge are souvenir shops and a gaudy WWII “museum" -- overpriced even at 30 baht. All we bought we a couple of bottles of Coke. We walked back to the guesthouse via the main road through town, a long strip occupied largely by auto/motorcycle sales and repair shops. The town’s main recreation, it seems, is buzzing down the road, mostly on two wheels.

The next day we rode the train to the end of the line at a place called Nam Tok, a few miles shy of the frontier with Burma. In the signs for tourists, this is called the Death Railway, though it’s only a small part of the line that Allied POWs and native conscripts slaved on. The ride to the end of the line takes about two hours, and a regular ride costs 17 baht each way—so for two round trips, we paid 68 baht, or about $2.70. At a table at the station were tourist tickets for 100 baht each. For this you got a guaranteed seat, a soft drink (which normally run 10 baht), and a silly certificate saying you’d ridden the Death Railway. The tout at the table wasn’t especially energetic, and he left us and a handful of other tourists alone after no one showed any interest in his tickets.

The Death Railway is a local line, making whistle stops fairly often. The line follows the river, though a lush tropical valley. You see the river only occasionally, but then spectacularly. The train had mostly emptied out by Nam Tok, which sported a seedy, nearly deserted station building under dense foliage. There were only a few minutes to look around anyway, since the same train was going back to Kanchanaburi. En route back the train hit a truck, just enough to jar the passengers a little. I think it was a maintenance truck parked too close to the rail. This delayed our return about 30 minutes, but we weren’t on any schedule, and didn’t care.

Turning 40, Base 11

Earlier today, Lilly took to closing my home office door on Ann, and holding it shut for a while, telling Ann, “You’re going to jail!” Ann protested this treatment by hitting a fist on the carpeted floor and saying “Why, Why, Why?”

This is the first time I’ve ever heard her use that useful word. But I suspect she got it from a scene in SpongeBob SquarePants. One of the characters was thrown in jail, and may have reacted that way, but later grew to like it because she didn’t have to deal with SpongeBob any more. (I sympathize. Curiously, SpongeBob at one point actually said the jailed character had been “institutionalized.”)

We returned a SBSP disk the other day, and there aren’t any more new ones available from Netflix for now. But the hypercheerful yellow sponge is still with us, in the form of a drinking cup, a toothbrush, toothpaste and Band-Aids. Oh, for 1% of the merchandising revenue of that character. Probably even 0.1% would make my job search unnecessary.

I turned 44 this week. I don’t think I’ve meditated on my birthdays much, if ever, here. But that’s a nice repeating double-digit number. If we counted in base 11, I’d have turned 40.

I spent the day in scenic Schaumburg, Illinois, dining in the evening at a good Mexican restaurant we’d long wanted to try. Contrast with my 33rd birthday: spent it in Bangkok, in an un-air-conditioned guesthouse, eating at the little place downstairs (man, the food was good in Thailand). When I turned 22, I was in Lüneburg, West Germany -- been a while since one needed to put it that way. The best meal in that town was halb Henchen mit Pommes Frites at a greasy spoon my friends discovered.

As for 11, I’m fairly sure I was it home in San Antonio, though I did spend some time in the summer of 1972 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, with my Aunt Sue and Uncle Ken. The Democratic National Convention was on TV with I visited them, so that would have been the second week of July.

I had to Google “Democratic Convention 1972” to get the date, of course. I’d forgotten that both major party conventions were in Miami Beach that year, with the Republican one in August. Maybe it was chosen for ease of crowd control: a narrow island with a handful of streets.