Boats and Lots of Sleep

October 8-10

The first big thing on Sunday was the boat ride. Actually two boats.

Joanna and I went around the block and took the metro one stop south to the Asok station and walked to the pier. Larry met us there and got onto one of the boats with us.

A year or two ago, he used to commute to work along this canal.

The boat is like a bus. You sit, if there’s room, or you stand and hold on. Only on this route there are no stoplights, just junk in the water and sometimes boats coming in the opposite direction.

We took the big bus to the end of the line and then transferred to a smaller boat, which was a tiny bit more challenging to board without knocking my hat into the water. But we all managed.

Larry pointed out his stop as we went by. It’s called Hua Chang, which means “elephant head,” named for a nearby bridge decorated with stone elephant heads. It is pronounced “Watchung,” just like the rail stop back home.

That makes it an easy one to remember.

We went a little farther and left the boat to go to a place called Bobae Market. We walked along looking at the exotic produce—piles of papaya, mango, pineapple, and dragonfruit.

That’s where Joanna got the photo of the day.

Larry took us to one of his old lunch spots, a pavilion serving street food. Joanna wanted unspiced vegetables with rice. Larry ordered a spicy dish for him and me. He told me it’s called Pad Prik Pow Moo Grob, stir-fried chili paste with crispy pork.

We also stopped to visit a large temple complex called the Temple of the Metal Castle. 

This was in the neighborhood of the Democracy Monument, which is one of many public structures, including the Queen’s Museum, that overlook a large boulevard designed for public processions.

Crowd control gates are already up in anticipation of the king’s funeral on the 26th of this month.

We took a cab back to the boat and got off at Hua Chung to stop at Larry’s apartment, far up in the sky with a balcony.

Joanna had some coconut water. Larry poured some for me and him, too, but added a shot of Pastis. Licorice and coconut are a surprisingly good combination.

After a short while, we were running low on beer and feeling a bit hungry besides. So we reconvened at a bar called Helter Skelter (complete with a line drawing of Charles Manson’s head on the sign). 

This place specializes in Thai craft beers, which are technically illegal. One, according to the label at least, is brewed in Laos and brought back to Thailand.

I had some damned fine ales, including two that went with dinner.

We waited for Kimberly to catch up to us and then went next door.

We don’t know the restaurant’s name because it is only written in Thai. It has a Chinese menu and I must have already been going downhill because I don’t remember what I had to eat, any more than I can remember the names of the ales. 

We had a date to meet Greg and Eugenia at their hotel for brunch, so we actually had to get up in the morning.

When morning came, I wasn’t ready for it.

Joanna had the name of the hotel, Okura Prestige Bangkok, and its address on Witthayu Road. She handed it to the first cabbie, who looked at it once, then twice, and said “no, no.”

The second driver didn’t know the hotel but said he knew the street. “50 baht,” he said.

That, I learned soon, was toll for the expressway. But that’s all right. By any other route, we would still be waiting in traffic. 

The lights hold for a long time in each direction here. As a result, stopped traffic backs up interminably. 

Earlier in the morning, Joanna and I were waiting at one intersection to cross a road not far from the hotel. The line of motorcycles waiting to turn got the green first. That let loose a river of kids in helmets pouring in an endless stream around a bend. Every once in a while a lone car was carried along by the current.

On our ride to the Okura Prestige, the taxi was creeping along a few feet at a time for the longest while after we left the toll road. In addition to the congestion of the roads in Bangkok, people feel it’s OK to park wherever it’s most convenient, like the right-turn-only-lane for instance. 

That’s why God invented cell phones. So you can call people and tell them why you are getting later and later.

The driver ran past the hotel because he had no clue where it was and was going too fast to see it. 

He eventually pulled into an area where we talked to four doormen. The first three had no clue and each sent us to the next.

The last one took one look at the paper, smiled, and then went inside to get directions.

The rest was easy. We had to go back to the start of the road. The hotel was close to the intersection.

The 24th floor was easy enough to find. So was Greg. He’s a tall, slender man who shaves his head.

I was trying to make conversation, but the voices in my head kept interrupting. I don’t think I walked into any walls or furniture, but can’t be sure.

 Nobody asked me to leave, and that’s a good thing.

Kimberly was with Greg and Eugenia when we arrived. Much of the conversation was about Kimberly’s activity in the Philippines. She and her boyfriend are updating a resort that has been in his family.

It seems they are doing much of the work themselves. Among other things, they expect that it will serve as a meeting venue for the many local organizations.

I managed to scarf down a couple of pieces of fruit and a small croissant. That and two cups of coffee.

I don’t know what was wrong with me. All I wanted to do was curl up and pass out. It may have been jet lag. I had only taken five or six beers. There was that cocktail, though.

Maybe it was the coconut water that did me in.

I spent the afternoon in bed. 

We had been talking about another boat ride and dinner with Larry but I had to beg off that.

We went to the hotel dining room for supper. I had some fried rice with crispy pork, but can’t say if it was good or mediocre. 

I was so far out of sorts that even the bottled water tasted off. 

The one hit of the meal was a surprise soup. It had a clear broth and some kind of tofu lumps. The broth had hint of chile, but overall it was soothing.

Thus soothed, I went back to bed.

Tuesday we had a 2:20 flight out of Bangkok’s other airport, Don Mueang (pronounced more or less like “Don Mwahn”) to take NokAir to Chiang Mai.

We stayed at the hotel till about 11 and had plenty of time to take lunch at the airport—more gyoza dumplings and some teriyaki pork. I still wasn’t back to beer, so I had tea.

Larry joined us because he’s going to Chiang Mai for a few days too. So is Kimberly, although her flight was considerably later than ours.

The flight takes an hour and a half. I didn’t sleep on the way but did put my head back with my eyes closed from time to time.

We are staying at the Boonthavon again. I was getting better all the time, but it was nap time again for me.

We caught up with Larry later at the U.N. Irish Bar, an ex-pat hangout about a block away on one of the main drags of the Old City called Ratchawitthi Road.

I ventured a few half-pints of Heineken, and they went down well. We ate dinner there.

Joanna had a BLT on whole wheat toast. I had a Cornish pastie. That’s pronounced “pass-tee,” I guess to distinguish it from a stripper’s accessory.

This morning we got up early, waited for the downpour to subside and then walked to the end of our soi to Ratchadamnoen Road near the Tha Phae Gate. 

We found the Black Canyon Coffee Shop open, where Joanna and I both had the same thing, pancakes with slices of banana cooked into them. The coffee is very good there, too.

On the way we met a monk out for his morning alms. We made a wei and gave him 100 baht. He chanted a much-needed prayer over my head.

God or Buddha bless you all.

I’m feeling better now. The beer-drinking is about to commence.

Harry

Back in Asia

October 5-7

We left Newark a bit after 11 in the morning on Thursday for the long flight to Tokyo, a little more than 13 hours non-stop to Narita airport.

It is a grueling run, and you have to remember to get up and walk up and down the cabin aisle from time to time. The Boeing 787 gave us headroom to stand in front of our seats, too.

I was trying out a new back brace, which Joanna had recommended. It worked wonders making the long trip a lot more comfortable, but still, after more than a dozen hours, my back was sore and my ass more so.

It seems that every time I go through Narita, something is different. Last time Joanna and I walked from gate to gate. The first time, when I was alone, had to go through conventional passport control.

This time, there was a quick pass through a passport check. One glance at your boarding pass and passport, and they let you through.

Of course, I’m usually so rocky by the time I get to Tokyo that maybe it’s the same every time, and I just remember only parts of it.

We got to Narita around 1:30 p.m. local time, which was about 13 hours ahead of daylight saving time in New Jersey.

I don’t know what meal we had—late dinner, maybe, or early breakfast—at a place called Avion, where we can sit by the window and watch the planes come and go.

We had a soup called udon and gyoza dumplings. I’m not sure what is in the dumplings, but they are very tasty.

I came across something new, to me at least, a black brew called Yebisu, which is like a slightly lighter version of Guinness. It’s a dry stout on nitrogen draft, which gives it a smooth, creamy texture. 

We had about five hours to kill, so Joanna took a nap while I went walking around the terminal. I came across another bar which had a tap for Asahi black, also new to me. It was another nitro stout, dry and smooth. 

The Yebisu and Asahi black were among the best local beers I’ve had in Asia.

The flight to Bangkok took about five hours. We got a couple of hours’ sleep on the  second leg of the trip and landed at Suvarnabhumi a little after 11 p.m. on the 6th.

While we waited to get our bags from the overhead, Joanna started to chat with the woman sitting next to her by the window. Turns out, she is an American, a student at the University of Arizona, who has come to Thailand to work with elephants.

Her group rescues domestic elephants and retrains them to be released into the wild. 

The trip from Newark to Bangkok takes about 25 hours travel and layover time, but the clock advances 36 hours because of the time difference.

I guess we got to our hotel, the Centric Place, around 1 a.m.

There was a message for Joanna. Her son Gregory asked her to phone him when we arrived at the hotel.

We didn’t have working phones. Maybe we could use Skype. But it was easier than that. The man at the desk offered Joanna the use of his cell.

Joanna called, fearing an emergency, but learned that Greg and his wife, Eugenia, wanted to let her know they were in town.

That was a surprise. Joanna knew that her niece Kimberly, who lives in the Philippines, was coming to Thailand during part of our stay here, but Greg and Eugie apparently had decided on short notice to come to Bangkok for a quick trip, too.

We slept until about 7:30 and went downstairs to breakfast. The Asian option was a rice porridge that in Cantonese is called cheok (sounds almost like “joke”) and a selection of mix-or-match ingredients—deep-fried dried fish, peanuts, cubes of chicken, preserved vegetable—to go into it. 

I’ve developed quite a taste for cheok, and Joanna grew up with it. 

There was also a salad described as spicy pickles. It consisted of pickled cabbage and sliced chiles. 

For dessert we had a small omelet.

Larry came to the hotel around 11 and we headed out to buy SIM cards for our phones. We had bought the phones in Bangkok a year and a half ago. The cards had expired, so we needed new ones.

We went to a mall not far from the hotel, and after a couple of false starts bought cards and then taxied to Larry’s new enterprise.

Larry’s significant other, Noi, is a barber ,and they have set up a small shop in I don’t know exactly where because we took a taxi to get there. It’s called The Barber by L & N. So if you get a chance, go and like it on Facebook.

We came bearing clippers, Clubman talc, and Barbicide for the shop. They were actually cheaper to buy in the States and ship to Joanna’s house, where I packed them in my suitcase, than to buy them and have them shipped directly to Thailand.

We met Noi for the first time and watched her set up her new toys. Then we left for a short stroll that took us to one of those rough-looking eating places that are so good in Thailand.

This one had a roof, long tables, and no walls. Outside, by the sidewalk, they were grilling fish dressed in salt.

That fish was tender and flavored by the salt that had worked through the skin.

We had that and a leafy green sometimes called morning glories. Then came a spicy wild boar, made with cocoanut milk. Very unusual, and very new to me.

We cabbed back to the hotel. The place doesn’t seem easy to find. 

Last night at the airport, we gave our driver a printout of the address, and he had to call someone for directions over the phone. Then he took us right to it.

This time the driver got lost. He circled a couple of blocks and then asked someone for directions. After that it was a straight run. Even with the fare for lost time, the meter read 63 baht—a little more than $1.80.

I find jet lag to be a wonderful feeling—that sense of disorientation, the inability to tell if you’re high or just tired—but it can play tricks on you. I lay down for a nap and expected to be up in maybe two hours. I was out for almost four.

Larry met us at the hotel again shortly before 7 and led us a few blocks to a Mexican fusion restaurant called OMG.

Most of the taps were dry because there had been a big party the night before, but the place specializes in local craft beers. Larry told us that it is technically illegal to brew craft beer in Thailand, but even so, it is a growing phenomenon.

I had a draft double IPA from Happy New Beer that ran a little more than 8 percent alcohol by volume. It was mildly fragrant, a little sweet (maybe from the alcohol), but nonetheless very drinkable.

I also drank a bottled milder version that ran 6.5 percent.

Joanna and I had beans and rice and shared a plate of chicken fajitas. The food was amazingly good.  And that’s not even considering that we were eating Mexican in Bangkok and the cook-proprietor was native Indian who had grown up in Thailand.

He came out to chat with us for a while. In addition to running the restaurant, he is a musician involved in various cover bands, one for 60s and 70s, another for heavy metal.

Travel is broadening. Especially if you like the beer and the food.

Good night, all, and stay well.

Harry

War and Oysters

September 12-13

Harrisburg hosts the National Civil War Museum and the State Museum of Pennsylvania. Large or small, one museum a day is enough. So which was it going to be?

The decision was made for me. The State Museum is closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Wikipedia describes the Civil War Museum as a non-profit educational institution. 

I just learned that it has a fairly colorful history itself. Apparently it was formed during the term of Harrisburg’s previous mayor, Stephen Reed. The building sits on top of a commanding hill in the city’s Reservoir Park.

The view is spectacular. There was an agreement that the museum could rent the ground for $1 a year.

The mayor had amassed a Civil War collection for the city and offered to sell it to the museum well below the city’s cost.

New mayor. Begin feud. 

According to an editorial on a news website, pennlive.com, the new mayor, Eric Papenfuse, once called the museum “a monument to corruption,” and wanted to shut it down.

Things have cooled a bit and both parties have struck a new deal. The museum will begin paying rents that will start at $45,000 a year and eventually grow to $100,000. The new mayor had at one time threatened to raise the rent to about $600,000 a year.

The museum can buy the city’s Civil War collection if it can raise $5.25 million in five years. 

If the museum can’t do it, the city will offer the collection on the open market. Harrisburg paid about $10 million to buy it all.

I knew none of that when I visited. The editorial was posted the next day, on the 13th.

Outside the museum there is a life-size bronze of a Confederate sergeant giving a drink of water to a fallen Union soldier. Called “Mission of Mercy,” it depicts an actual event. After the repulse of a Union charge at Fredericksburg, wounded men lay on the field calling for help.

The sergeant, Richard Kirkland, gathered several canteens and went onto the field. Some of the Union soldiers started to shooting at him, but when they saw what he was doing, they were ordered to hold their fire. “That man is too brave to die,” the officer said.

As museums go, this one is pretty well organized. You start at the top of the stairs in a room that deals with a history of American slavery and the issues that led to the Civil War. 

This is where you are introduced to a video of several characters, including a Massachusetts blacksmith who is an escaped slave, his wife, and three brothers who take different paths. One is a Union officer; another is a Confederate cavalryman; the third takes off to Montana to look for gold.

This room leads to the next, about secession and the beginning of the war. Each room leads to the next in chronological order. 

There are artifacts of various kinds, weapons, uniforms, flags, tools, pocket hymnals, and whatnot. There are mannequins dressed as typical soldiers and sailors on both sides.

The captioning is generally good, although sometimes there is a curious object without an identifier. From time to time, an article was described but I couldn’t find it. Maybe it had been removed from the case. 

Some rooms contain videos that check in on the characters at different stages of the period. The blacksmith joins the Colored Troops, for instance. He complains about the unequal treatment of black and white soldiers, but decides he is doing the right thing.

Other rooms run videos of a historian (didn’t get the name, but it’s not Shelby Foote) describing some of the more horrific battles of the war.

A tableau of a Union camp has a soundtrack behind it that includes a parody of “Dixie” in which the rebels are called children who should “listen to your Uncle Sam.” 

The highlight of the place for me is all the information posted on the walls with the exhibits. The detail was just right. It was a real subject review for me.

I got there around one, figuring four hours would be plenty of time. I was little more than half-way through when an announcement over the PA system said the museum would close in 10 minutes.

It was that absorbing.

On the way back to the hotel, I noticed a steakhouse called Leeds Ltd. It hadn’t turned up on my Google searches.

Its website looked promising. First thing on the menu was something called Oysters Louie. This could be interesting.

I sat at the bar and working my way into a Medocino County pinot noir when I saw something listed as Creamy Crab soup. What would that be? Maybe like clam chowder, but with a different invertebrate?

Not quite. It wasn’t soupy at all but instead was a thick pink almost-pudding with lumps of crab meat. It may qualify as a bisque. It had a little sweetness somewhere in there, but nothing cloying or offensive.

Second course was an appetizer, Spinach Crepes Alfredo, which were filled with spinach, Romano, and Mozzarella. The crepes came smothered in an Alfredo sauce.

That was better even than the crab chowder. 

Most bizarre, though, were the Oysters Louie, which I had for dessert. The oysters are lightly battered and fried. They are served on the shell with something Leeds calls Rockefeller sauce, but tasted nothing like Oysters Rockefeller. 

The dish had a good hit of hot chiles, and the oysters were covered with blue cheese dressing, which counteracted the capsaicin. It was terrific.

The pinot noir was unusual. It had a lot of sharpness, almost like the tannins in Chianti. I never tasted that in a California pinot before. 

It was OK, but I liked the Argentinian Malbec that followed it better. I had two of those before I left.

Wednesday morning I left La Quinta around 10:30 and was back in the old neighborhood a few minutes after one. There was a little rain on the way, but it was mostly smooth sailing all the back.

Stay well, everybody. This run is over.

Harry

Historic Sights

September 10-11

My Sunday exploration took me to the center of the city of Lancaster for a stroll around the historic district. 

It is full of lore, as you’d expect for a town that got its start in 1730: early settlers, French and Indian Wars, Revolution, Civil War, and various atrocities.

The site of the old jail has a historical marker relating that sometime in the mid-1700s a group of Conestoga Indians were being held at the jail under protective custody. It wasn’t very effective. They were all murdered by a local vigilante group known as the Paxton Boys.

The Paxton Boys and some of their other activities are mentioned in the historical novel “The Light in the Forest.”

I ran into a note about another person I had read about. General John Reynolds, who was among the first to engage the Rebels at Gettysburg and also among the first to die there, lived in Lancaster.

A very interesting guy, whose name and exploits were new to me, was Joseph Simon. He was a merchant trader who had extensive land holdings in the West. He had actually traveled as far as the Mississippi River. That was quite a distinction in the 18th century.

In the 1740s his house hosted the first Jewish services in Pennsylvania west of Philadelphia.

There’s a charming brick building that looks like it should be in Quebec. The sign outside says this kind of story-and-a-half house—one full story with a dormered roof—was standard in the early days of the town.

Another charmer, a two-and-a-half story stone house, was the home of someone with a name I know, mainly because I was brought up Lutheran.

This house belonged to Frederick Muhlenberg, who served as the first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Lots of Muhlenbergs made names for themselves in 18th century, so I went to the Internet to sort some of them out.

Frederick’s father, Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg, is the one I learned about in Sunday School days. He was sent from Germany as a missionary to Pennsylvania, where he is credited with establishing the Lutheran church in America.

There was also a John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, Frederick’s brother, who served as a general in the Continental Army.

All three of these Muhlenbergs were clergymen. Frederick was licensed by the Lutheran church and later also by the Anglican so he could preach in Virginia. That's in Colonial times, before the First Amendment.

Dinner on Sunday was an improvement. The Lancaster Brewing Tap Room, near the Rodeway Inn on the Lincoln Highway, has good meat loaf with even better mushroom gravy. 

I even got to try two new brews. I started with one called, appropriately enough, Pre-Flight IPA. It’s lighter on alcohol than Lancaster Brewing’s other India pale ales. Sharp and crisp, as an IPA should be, but also light, almost like a Pilsner, but without the Pilsner aftertaste.

I had another Hop Hog, one of the ales that I had tried at Pearly Baker’s in Easton. There is a Boss Hog, too, a double IPA that comes in at 9 percent alcohol, but I decided to pass that one up. I was driving.

They had an extra special bitter on tap. Well, they bill it as an ESB, but it had a strong taste of chocolate, probably from the malt. It was a deep amber, but came across more like an English stout, a little sweeter than Guinness, say. So that one is a been-there, done-that.

Monday took me to a historic site of a different order.

It’s a short hop from Ronks to Middletown, Pa., an hour tops. Middletown is a quaint old town about 10 miles south of Harrisburg. A mile or two south of Middletown is Three Mile Island.

It’s a simple route to get there: U.S. 30 West and then Pa. 441 North. The street view on Google Maps shows the power station behind a thin screen of trees. 

 I was concerned that I might miss it. That, it turns out, is damned near impossible.

The road comes over a rise and you see the tops of the four huge cooling towers. At the time, two were active with huge, but gentle plumes of steam. The other two were still.

A short while later, you come up square across from them. The road has a place at the side where you can pull your car while you gawk. 

Clearly, I wasn’t the first person to do this.

You can’t drive onto the island, because it’s privately owned, but then I didn’t want to do that anyway. And this was a better view than I had hoped for. 

In March 1979 Reactor 2 at the plant suffered a coolant loss. There was an explosion and a release of radioactive material into the environment.

The entire event was largely contained by the pressure vessel that housed it. I’ve read that the containment was so effective that operators, who knew the reactor was overheating, at first didn’t know there had been an explosion.

The issue of nuclear power is so politically charged that you never know what to believe. 

In connection with a story for Mechanical Engineering magazine, I spoke to Pennsylvania’s environmental administrator a few years ago and he told me that readings in the atmosphere in the days after the incident showed less radioactivity than there had been a year earlier. The earlier radioactivity measurement was attributed to drifting fallout from an atmospheric nuclear test in Red China.

I do remember how nervous we all were at the time. A lot of nuclear power projects ended then. 

I am ambivalent about nuclear power. Can it be dangerous? Yeah, sure. 

But it is nowhere near as dangerous or environmentally destructive as digging and burning coal. 

We haven’t decided what to do about spent nuclear fuel. We haven’t found a way to safely store coal ash either.

Coal and nukes are becoming dinosaurs not because of social agitation or government regulation. They are up against the one supreme decider of civilization: market forces. 

The Three Mile Island plant in recent years has been losing money, and Exelon, the owner, plans to close it in 2019 unless it gets help from the state of Pennsylvania. Apparently the natural gas plants can sell their electricity much cheaper than a nuclear generating station, or at least this nuclear station, can.

So the question out here may be: Is the state going to step in with some kind of bailout or a local New Deal? That might be nice for maybe several thousand people. It may also be unfair to people working for Exelon’s competitors.

Who can say? Not me, thank goodness. As an ex-Communist, I’m in no position to judge these things.

It was a short drive, half-hour at most, to my new digs, the La Quinta Harrisburg Airport Hershey.

I got to the room and searched Google for places with craft beer and good food. It gave me a very short, and rather disappointing, list. The menus were short, gimmicky, and heavy. Most of the beer selections were limited.

I wound up going to the nearest place, another franchise of the Lancaster Brewing Co. That’s the company that runs the Tap Room in Ronks.

I would have ordered the chicken schnitzel but it seems to have the same gravy as the meatloaf from last night. Very good, but not for two nights in a row.

I opted for summer sausage with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. The sausage was very salty, but that was probably intentional, to go with the beer.

This place had fewer taps than the one in Ronks, so I wound up having two Hop Hog IPAs. 

There was a gose, a sour ale, on tap, so I drank that for dessert. The description said they use the wild yeast strain for only part of the fermentation. Then they add more-conventional yeast. I could taste the sour edge but it was mild. 

A very pleasant sour. And just right to have one among those bitter IPAs.

Be well, all, and here’s hoping that the sour edge is always just right for you.

Harry