8 September 2019
[Above photo: One of my students sent me this. I have no illusions about my Bama zaga fluency!]
Hm. The electricity is off, an unusual occurrence. Once or twice a month, at most. Generally, it’s on again in an hour or so. I’ll fire up the tiny propane stove for tea.
I was walking home last night after supper at my new-to-me Japanese restaurant and passed all the fruit and vegetable sellers on the street. The fish, meat, and prawns stop selling at about 4PM—-too perishable, I think, to stay out longer. I passed a guy—it is only guys selling durian and mangosteen, their niche—with a heap of durian. I’d abandoned durian as the last 4 or 5 were not nearly as ripe as the first. Cleverly, they make a clandestine slice in the skin so that when you smell it, it seems ripe. Then I thought, oh ,just once more. I selected a little brown one which wasn’t sliced and smelled very good. I took it home, cut it open, and—-presto, I beheld magnificent, ripe, custardy durian fruit inside.
Two days ago at 8AM, after finishing a wonderful paper by John Bowlby, entitled “The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds”, which he presented at the 50th Maudsley Lecture in 1976, I went grocery shopping on 17th and 18th streets. The markets have developed amazingly since I first arrived; they are now very crowded and bustling with all manner of foodstuffs. I bought a kilo of tiger prawns ($6.50), a large pork filet, ½ kilo of onions, fresh broccoli, fresh asparagus, and, wonder of wonders, hmyi chin. This is fermented bamboo which I have had with beef in Chinese restaurants at home. I was assured that it is of Burmese, not Chinese, origin and that it was available in any “wet market”. What is a “wet market”? A street market where everyone and everything gets wet when it rains, I’m told. So I bought a ¼ kg of hmyi chin to saute with my pork.
As I was leaving I saw a man selling incense and burners in the street. His display was smoking and produced a wonderful fragrance. I bought one—-a reconfigured “Swis Milk” can previously holding a “Sweetened Beverage Creamer”—and a supply of incense. When I got home I realized the incense was dried turmeric root, which smells heavenly.
I soak all the vegetables in a light bleach solution for 5 minutes while I trim and slice the pork and portion it and the shrimp in 1-2 meal containers and pop them in the freezer. I then rinse the veges for 10 minutes and I am done for the week. 1 ½ hours, fun and novelty each time, total cost about $11. Hard to beat.
Speaking of Japanese restaurants, I now have 4 within 3 blocks of my apartment. Japanese food is my go-to at home but I also appreciate the Japanese intense dislike of dirt, flies, and contamination of all kinds. A safe bet for dining. Burmese food is generally too oily and overcooked for me. It is much more like Indian food than Thai or Vietnamese. I prefer the ethnic foods heavy on fresh vegetables like Kachin, Shan, Palaung, and Wa, of which there is an abundance in Yangon but none in my immediate area.
I took the students out to lunch 3 days ago. There is a very fancy Singaporean hot-pot place, Beauty in a Pot, which recently opened next to the clinic. It is running a 50%-off special for the first 2 weeks. Of course, many others had the same idea, so we jumped back in our cars and cruised to another hot-pot spot nearby, this one owned by a Burmese super-model who married a rich businessman. It was such a slick operation, Henry Ford would have approved of the assembly-line. Hot pots are quite the thing here. I’m a little surprised they haven’t caught on yet in the US. Perhaps they have and mass-assembled food just won’t fly in Berkeley. We ate our fill, and more, as you can return to the source endlessly. An added delight at lunch was that they requested a photo ID to confirm that I was eligible for the 50% Senior Citizen Discount. They were uncertain if this old grifter was trying to get away with something at 79yo!
In Berkeley we had a copper Korean hot pot in the bottom of which you’d put glowing briquettes and in the upper circular “pot” there would be broth into which, communally, you’d put things to cook and eat. Much more fun, I think, than fondue. The last time we used it I heard a scratching sound in the heating vent and had to dissemble a duct in the basement to retrieve Ariane’s dusty, absconded hamster, Hammy. Our guests were amused.
On Friday I took a taxi to the Embassy to retrieve an ATM card Linda mailed me, another taxi to my carpenter’s workshop, and a third, with the dollhouse on-board, to deposit it in the Isolation ward we use on Thursdays to see children. I then walked a few miles home, happy to stretch my legs. Fully 2 1/2 hours of taxiing for about $7.
It is only time before DT’s avarice trips him up. Not to suggest that his path has been anything but a constant stumble. Lieutenant Zero staying 180 miles from his meetings in Dublin at Trump’s luxury golf resort. Air Force personnel staying at another luxury golf resort and keeping an airport in western Scotland from closing by paying exorbitant refueling costs. All the Middle-Easterners staying at his luxury hotel in DC. Proposing his luxury Florida golf resort for the next G-7 meeting. As if it is the American way, to use the highest office in the land to enrich yourself.
Perhaps it is, you suggest, but it shouldn’t be. He has reduced us to just another, if large, banana republic and he’s the tin pot dictator. As a nation we have always exploited others for profit but in a wobbly way, regularly scandalized by publicity of the same. It’s the angel on one shoulder and devil on another. Periodically we try to state, and follow, more noble principles. DT seems less than capable of any principles, let alone human feelings, posing in a hospital photo-op with his smiling mannequin for a grin and thumbs-up photo with the parents and infant of a couple who were just killed in a mass shooting. Watch the silent, castrated Republicans scurrying off the sinking ship to hide under a rock as 2020 approaches. It gives eunuchs a bad name! I’ll be a year older next election and never thought I’d live to see 80, never imagined I’d witness this sham of a mockery of a travesty, let alone the rebirth of our Democracy..
I’ve decided to stay and teach from January through March, if the year-long diploma course is approved by the Ministry of Health and Sports (?and Education) in time. Three months goes by in a trice and my investment in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry here compels me to want to launch the next class carefully. If I do stay, I may visit the US in December.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 