Spring cleaning

One thing about unpacking after a long hiatus is that you never quite know what you're going to find in the boxes.






Or you get a chance to revisit old, long-beloved creatures that you know it's time to let go of...

Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 1: Earlobe Noodles

I don't like to be bereft of projects (though somehow this is rarely a problem for me); and I had just been through six months where I barely got to cook at all. So before I even got home I had made major culinary plans, the most ambitious of which is the Noodlemaking Project.

Actually it's not that complicated. I just decided that as a Homecoming Resolution, I wanted to make noodles from scratch once a week for a year. I got addicted to breadmaking a few years ago and baked at least three times a week, with the result that I can improvise all sorts of bread depending on my mood, flat or loaf, leavened or un-. The plan once I get cosy with noodles is to progress to cakes, since my recipeless experiments in pastry thus far have NOT been successful. Noodles seemed a lot more forgiving (and easier to eat en masse), and so a better way to ease back into cooking.

Jet lag couldn't keep me down, so my first full day back saw me tossing flour in a bowl with some salt, oil, and an egg. I'm focussing my explorations on the cookbook Beyond the Great Wall, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, to begin with anyhow. I've ogled the photos and browsed the recipes but not really cooked from it yet, but there's a fairly broad noodle section, most of which are simple to make. I decided the Inaugural Noodle would be Earlobe Noodles, from western Tibet.

Making the dough is pretty much the same as making a bread dough - you just stir it all together, knead it a bit, and then let it rest awhile. The recipe calls for using a food processor, but I prefer to do things by hand when possible and this dough came together easily, though I may have ended up using a bit more water that way. While the dough was sleeping I made up a quick stew. Noodles are often eaten with lamb in Central Asia, but I figured a vegetarian chickpea-tomato-cabbage combination would work too.

By the time the water was boiling, my little sister had dropped by and my mother came up from her endless unpacking, so we got to shape the noodles together. This step is why I picked the earlobe noodles to start with. You just divide the dough into four pieces and roll them into long sausages. Then you stand over the bubbling pot and tear off little pieces, flinging them into the water. It got a bit crowded standing there together in the steam, but it seemed like the essence of being home, hungry but smelling the rich smells and working together for our meal.

And the noodles were delicious. Thick and soft but with a lovely springy bite; despite uneven size and shape none of them were soggy. They had enough flavour that we all sneaked a few extra noodles eaten plain while we were cleaning up. The stew coated them nicely and the vegetables were a fresh contrast to the slippery noodle rounds. If it's this easy every week, the year is going to fly by...

The morning after

My first morning back in Canada dawned clear and cold, with a startlingly low snowline on the local mountains. This is the view that greeted me when I stumbled blearily into the kitchen, and true to my recent training, I immediately stumbled back to the bedroom to fetch my camera. Phew! I didn't leave all the beauty behind me in Asia. It was a gloriously sunny day, and the espresso machine blinked at me from its corner. It's good to be home.

My Wandering Days Are Over

Photo: Kamakura-Enoshima Furii Kippu, day pass for a trip to the region in Kanagawa-ken, with a background of commuters hurrying for the Shonan-Shinjuku line back to the city. I had visited Kamakura for the first time on my first trip to Japan, in July 2008. It was such a pleasure to return on my last full day in Japan, in Asia, to go back to see the Daibutsu (Great Buddha) and the Kannon Hasedera Temple, as well as new discoveries like Enoshima Island. Six months on, so much to revisit, so much new to find.

You know my wandering days are over
Doesn't mean that I'm getting boring
You tell me
I'm tired of listening to myself here

I'm back! Safely home! And although, like in the song by Belle & Sebastian, "six months on, the winter's gone", I'm not filled with melancholy like the lonely circus boy and disenchanted pony. Instead I'm full of energy to leap into my new life, to settle into Vancouver, and to sort through the detritus of what seems like several past lives currently tucked into myriad boxes.

But I'm not turning my back on the trip altogether. I've transferred all 7,389 photos to my computer, and eventually I'll start sorting through them and posting some more here. Although I never got around to writing most of my planned posts on my travel music, I might get around to it now...and there are always future trips to plan.

You know my bip-bopping days are over
I hung my boots up and then retired from the disco floor
Now the centre of my so called being is
The space between your bed and wardrobe with the louvre doors

Lyrics here.

Happy Birthday Daddy!

So glad we got to celebrate not too far off the day.

Offering: for March 10th and every day

I first started thinking about travelling to Malaysia a long time ago, thanks to a book given to me by my auntie, my mother's sister. We shared a lot of ideas about travel, about the wonders of linguistic and cultural immersion, and I think she gave me the book to help spur me onto further travels of my own, though it was about fifteen years before I finally got to Malaysia.

Twelve years ago, I went to Costa Rica, which was a place my auntie knew and loved well. I remember the email exchanges we had before and after my trip, and I remember too my auntie berating me a little bit when I was slow to respond, teaching me email etiquette that was still relatively new to me back then.

I can't help thinking about that now that I'm finally here in South-East Asia, how much I wish I'd been quicker to write those emails, to write these ones. Because now, Auntie, you're not in any place where you can read all the things I'd like to write to you about Malaysia, or answer any of the questions I'd like to ask. We lost you on another March 10th, much too soon.

Your death was the first one for me, and at the time I had no idea how strong your presence would continue to be. At first all you can feel is the absence, which doesn't get better over time but hits you unexpectedly with full intensity, time and time again. And later anger as another kind of grieving - anger that when I finally started to study linguistics too, it was too late for all the debates we should have been able to have, the disagreements and maybe the new conclusions we could have found together. Anger at all the other things you should have had that time took away too early.

In 2008, we lost another beloved auntie, my father's sister this time, also to cancer. Another auntie who shared the delight in travel, in immersing yourself through the medium of language (and coincidentally, also a sense of deep connection to Latin America). And more grief, and more anger. I wanted to bring my children to the two of you, listen maybe a little rebelliously to your parenting advice, get to know you as a fellow adult not just as a niece and a child. I wanted you both to be able to grow old.

I won't be able to show you my photos or confess my moments of weakness or joy on this voyage of mine. But I wish that in some way you can know how much you are both with me along the way. How thoughts of you come so unexpectedly from some sharp image etched on the air, from laughter; and how the thoughts come with a sudden constriction in my throat and tears in my eyes. And how joyful it still is to think of you, to feel your presences even though I wish so much that you were still here.

I had no idea at first, how long grief lasts. But in the end I wouldn't give it up, if it meant not knowing you still. Queridas tias, os amo.

Street cart

In Solo, Java, Indonesia.

More from Candi Cetho

Really, really spectacular.

Street sweets

Foolishly, I never tried whatever this is.

In Yogya, Indonesia.

Gamelan

Wayang kulit (shadow puppet) show in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Mak toum

Mak toum or bale (or beal; or Bengal quince) fruit infusion, refreshing and delicious. Tamarind restaurant, Luang Prabang, Laos.

Sunset

The same field outside of Mae Sot, Thailand.

Young coconut ice cream

At Chatuchak Market in Bangkok.

Fresh young coconut ice cream with coconut jelly, water coconut fruit, and toasted peanuts. Mmm.

High-tech low-tech

Photo: After doing their own laundry, boarding school students hang their clothes out to dry on a barbed-wire fence, near Mae Sot, Thailand.

As I've travelled around South-East Asia of course I've seen people living with far less technology, making do with manual versions of what would be electronic in North America, or just doing without. So it's especially interesting to see some technology that we have to do without.

The item I can most see a market for is the mosquito zapper. Shaped like a tennis racket, you wave it slowly through the air and it fries mosquitoes before they can bite you. It's amazing to me no one sells this in Canada! (Or do they?)

Perhaps less practical but pretty cute is the pocket sewing machine. It's basically a stapler with its guts altered so that when you close the stapler with your hand, it produces even stitches on a piece of cloth. Not necessarily that much faster than handsewing, but adorable and seemingly sold at markets everywhere.

Bicycles, South-East Asia style

This photo shows my second-favourite bike habit of the region - carrying a friend on the bike rack who holds a parasol over both your heads.

I never managed to get a photo of my absolute favourite bike trick, which takes schoolgirl fondness to a whole new level. Two girls will ride along side by side on two bikes, holding hands in between them.

Honourable mention goes to being a small child on a bike much too big for you, carrying your even tinier sibling tied onto your back with a big checked cotton scarf.

So near yet so far

Women doing laundry just across a river in Myawaddy, Burma. Taken from the Thai side of the Rim Moei river.

Modes of transport

Well the goats aren't actually a mode of transport. Maybe they're trying to hail a motorbike taxi. Mae Sot, Thailand.

Dry season

Cracked earth on the outskirts of Mae Sot, Thailand.

Terrace life

Burmese meal on the terrace of "our" house, on my last night in Mae Sot, Thailand.

Sidling sideways

Past some tiny jewel coloured crabs at a street marketstall on Yaowarat Road, Bangkok Chinatown.