Friday, February 5, 2010

Friday, february 5






I think i may have started a senior citizen's sunrise biking club. singyam met up with me in the dark again this morning to go biking and this time she had invited four of her friends. i was meeting all the bad-ass old ladies of chiang rai. all the women i'd met before didn't like to break a sweat or any type fo exertion so this was a rare treat. everyone had their flashlights in the bike baskets. they liked my headlamp which they called a "necklace of light" when i left it around my neck. one lady had what appeared to be a squey dog toy lashed to her handlebars with rope. whenevr we passed anyone that she knew, which was most of the town, she squeaked it at them. she also squeaked it in response to trucks that honked at us for drifting too far into their territory on the road. i kept thinking she would follow up the squeak with her middle finger, but she never did. we went a different route today than we had yesterday following the main road more. singyam had told me that she would take me to see the flowers and when we got there i knew exactly what she meant. it wa a huge public garden but it was closed until 8 and it was only 7. supon took down the bamboo rails blocking the gate and climbed through, motioning for the rest of us to follow. we did, leaving our bikes at the gate and feeling rebellious. we walked through the gardens, the only witnesses that monring to how a hundred purple orchids looked with the red light of the runrise on them. we stayed until the orange ball rose above the lake, hanging there to check how it looked in the water, and a security guard came by to scold us for breaking in. he didn't seem too angry but shooed us out anyway. when we got back all the women said that they wanted to go every day next week.

when i finished helping nit with chores and english lessons, i wandered back over to singyam's houe. she was boiling some green water on the stove that had big leaves in it. i asked her is it was tea. she said no but gave me a cup to drink after she added a pinch of smaller leaves. "good for heart and..." she pointed to her back "for farmerswho work very hard." her brother was a farmer and i could only assume she was making it for his sore back. it smelled like leaves and tasted sort of bitter. singyam had a big winge bottle filled with Pen's dad's homemade honey in it and i asked her if i coudl add some to the not-tea. she said, with her finger in the air as if she had just had an epiphany, "THAT is a VERY good idea." She added some to hers too. the sweet plus the bitter combo was delicious. "ah roi" i told her. she agreed.

when nit came into my room to tell me it was time to go to work, she saw andrea gibson's poetry book "pole dancing to gospel hymns" on my bed. It had a picture of an organ on the front. " christian book?" she asked me, probbaly recognizing the word "hymn" from the front of her church's hymn book which had the title in english adn thai despite the fact that the entire thing was written in thai. "Poool dancing," she read slowly. I hoped she would ask me what poool dancing was. i wanted to tell her it was a type of dance for worship. i still hadn't answered her first question. "Nit" (she was referring to herself in the third person constantly), "Nit like to dance, you like?" " yes, i like to dance" i told her, smirking to myself at the way the conversation had played out in my head.

No comments:

Post a Comment