I have a surprisingly easy time most days avoiding gluten, but the past couple have been rough. Something bothered my stomach, and I don’t know what it could have been.
Two nights ago I stayed up until about 2am. I had finally gotten the new update for my Kindle which allows books to be placed into collections, so I labeled all my books then stayed up even later reading. Without a small lamp to read by, I have to have the big bright room light on so it’s easy to stay up. The result was that I slept through breakfast, which was probably going to be butter tea and roasted barley flour (tzampa) anyway. So I pulled out my bag of emergency gluten-free oats given to me by my brother-in-law prior to the trip, boiled some water, and readied the honey. It was to be my first oatmeal since Kunming.
Yesterday morning I learned that rolled oats can go rancid, and no amount of honey hides this flavor.
I was later gifted with fresh yak yogurt, but without a clean spoon to dunk back into the honey, it was too sour to eat plain. If you think plain cow-milk yogurt is too sour (I don’t) then this would be unbearable. I suck on lemons, and I couldn’t eat this. It explains why I can’t find unsweetened yogurt in the store though.
Today, I woke at a reasonable time because I cut my reading off around 11:30, but breakfast was (wait for it) butter tea and tzampa. It looked like the cook had fried up some rice, possibly for me, but all that remained was a dirty pan.
The bean cake fryer.
I filled up my mug with butter tea, (the electricity just went out as I was typing this) grabbed a metal food tin, and headed to the square for some street food. My favorite guy was there, and still setting up for the day. Luckily for me, he got his fires going and his food cooking before bothering with the tent and benches. Today my breakfast was liang fen, which is starting to become a delicious habit for me.
Liang fen is a cake made of bean starch. It wobbles a bit like jello and is usually white or sometimes yellow. In Kunming, I had it sliced into sticks and served cold with cucumbers and various seasonings. In Shangri-la is is a repulsive, delicious grey, served fried, mushed up a bit, and covered with hot peppers, green onions, cilantro, vinegar, some oil with what looks like crushed peanuts, and some hua jao (Sichuan numby peppercorn). It still requires a bit of attention though, since they have a big jar of soy sauce sitting there, and they want to use the ladle for every liquid on offer.
Half in my stomach, half in my bowl-thing.
Despite knowing that it gets dipped in everything for the other customers, I tell myself that if I don’t see them do it, it’s ok. Today I had a spoon with me so she used it for the liquids. One of these times, I’ll have to take a friend to explain to these nice people why I panic when they mix the spoons. I know enough Chinese now to keep them from adding the soy sauce, but not enough to explain that it’s more than a preference.
To wrap up, delicious breakfast for about $0.40, and it didn’t poison me. Now I wait for the electricity and/or the water to come back on. 
A few weeks ago, I went to a yoga class here in Shangri-la. It consisted of 2 of the LONGEST sun salutations I’ve ever done in my life, plus some time in boat pose and a couple of others. My yoga mat was not really something I considered packing, so I ended up using one there…against my better judgment. One can’t really do yoga in socks, so yeah, you can probably see where this is going.
Two nights later I woke up with intense itching and burning on my feet. I have been coating my feet in various creams and sprays both brought from home and purchased here ever since. It was gone for a while and came back with a vengeance 4 or 5 days ago, and I wrote to my MIL to make sure I was treating it with the right stuff. It’s never been so persistent before. If I had enemies, I MIGHT be cruel enough to wish this upon them. It is so distracting at all times of the day.
Last night, in search of powder to keep my feet dry on the days when it’s too cold for sandals, I took my lovely hubs into a pharmacy. I had already tried searching and miming at two places, so his help was necessary. There was no powder, but there were 2 things I could soak my feet in. They would supposedly help my feet stay dry. The “better” of the 2, which was the one with all the commercials on tv, went home with me for the equivalent of $2.
The hubs also had to read the directions for me, and they stated that I had to mix the whole bottle of solution in an appropriate amount of hot water and soak for half an hour. If the problem persists, I have to wait 20 days to repeat.
I have no idea what is in this stuff. It stinks. And I’ve managed to misjudge the cold-to-boiling ratio, so I’m soaking for half an hour in lukewarm water past my ankles. And I keep having mental images of my Kindle sliding off my lap and into this bucket, so I grip it extra tight while I read.
So let me set the scene – I am in the bathroom, on the toilet lid, reading with my feet in a bucket of stinky, green, barely warm liquid. The hubs is at the desk, using his computer. It’s about 9pm. The lights go out, and we hear a huge smash. We still don’t know how or why, but a fuse had blown in our building which caused our light to break. Or maybe it broke, causing the fuse to blow. Either way, we ended up with a live wire dangling from the ceiling, glass all over the floor, and a searing hot light casing in the middle of it all.
The painting instructor who lives below us came up and peeled the wires apart to prevent a short circuit (the fuse was out so it wasn’t live then…I assume it is now) and lent us a broom and dustpan. I had emerged from the bathroom dripping green liquid (the hubs said, “what stinks?”) and wearing flip-flops to help with the cleanup, but went back in to complete my soak after it was over.
I wasn’t timing the soak, so I pulled my feet out when the burning started to become a bit worrisome. The tops of my feet and ankles were bright red, but my toes and soles looked like zombie leper feet. They had taken on a greenish-grey pallor and were enhanced by peeling and bubbling areas that I hadn’t been aware of. I dried them with the blow dryer, and the burning on the previously normal areas of my feet became actually frightening. I scratched, which removed some skin, so I decided a cold wet washcloth would be better. It was.
Wet again, I had to blow dry my feet a second time, then coat in the aforementioned cream. I went to bed, hoping I would still have feet in the morning. Now, they are…normal. All night, the itching was confined to a single toe, and was quite manageable. I am not afraid that people will run away in tears if I wear sandals.
What are you, noxious green wonder liquid?
As predicted, I’ve been reading nearly constantly. If my crochet hook is not in my hand, my Kindle is. This is partially due to my continued inability to connect my computer to the internet in the apartment (resolved fully as of this morning), but it certainly helps that I have no job and 17 books currently on my Kindle. While we were on the bus back from Jiangxi, I finished reading Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which I will get to in a minute. Instead of sighing and looking out the window for the remaining 20 hours of the ride, I went back to reading Atomic Lobster by Tim Dorsey (which I finished a couple of days later and moved on to Up in the Air by Walter Kirn…which I finished the morning I began writing this review). When I did something similar in the Philippines back in 2000, it resulted in a large pile of books that I didn’t have room to bring home with me. I’m diggin’ this Kindle thing. A lot.
Half the Sky Review
If you’re not familiar with Nick Kristof’s column in the NY Times, you should be. He writes about issues that are important but often not well-known, and I’m grateful for being introduced to these. Kristof is careful to not merely complain about things; he often highlights the work of a person or an organization which has been working on the highlighted issue with good results. His appeals also often lead to a flood of donations for whatever charity he mentions.
The book is no exception, for it contains a large appendix which lists all the charities he mentions in his narrative as well as others he knows of. They are sorted into the same categories as the sections of the book: sex trafficking, gender-based violence (including neglect), and maternal mortality. The narrative itself approaches each general topic from several angles, each telling the story of one or a few women and Nick or Sheryl’s experience with them. For someone brought up with plenty of opportunities, the stories are shocking. Each situation is impossible to imagine, starting with the opening story of a Cambodian girl who was sold into sex slavery and escaped, only to be jailed and have a crooked cop sell her again. There is no way for me to wonder what I would do in such a situation, because it’s so far beyond my experience.
Half the Sky will move you, hopefully to action. Because I’m lucky enough to be spending the majority of this calendar year volunteering, I intend to find a way to put a special focus on the girls and women. I won’t know specifically how I can do this until I get there, but I will try to highlight it here. Once I’m back in the US and earning money, you can bet that I’ll be contributing far more than I have in the past. Kristof mentions a few “price points” in the book:
- Tithing, which is traditionally giving 10% of one’s income to the church, need not be limited in such a way. The idea is to work a certain percentage into your budget and making giving a priority.
- The world spends $40 billion annually on pet food, but an increase of only $9 billion per year in aid money would “provide all effective interventions for maternal and newborn health to 95% of the world’s population”. What if we all donated, each month, to a charity focused on this problem, an amount equal to whatever we’ve spent on pet food?
Please, read this book, and start reading Kristof’s column in the New York Times.
The Hubs and I went to a Fair Trade bazaar today (conveniently located right next to the indoor location for the local farmer’s market) and managed to find a few gifts for friends and family. Christmas shopping is always a delicate thing for me, since I’m on a constant quest to de-clutter. I tend to take my feelings about a beautiful-yet-useless trinket and assume that others would feel similarly. (This is where pictures would come in handy for today’s post, but I didn’t think to bring the camera.) I even though about not going to the sale because even though fair trade is important to me, it often tends to be trinkets. So how do you support the little guys and gals, both domestic and abroad, without filling your(or your giftee’s) house with gorgeous, pointless objects?
Consumables
Bath products and foods were abundant at this fair, and often you can find raw goods like shea butter to make your own, if you’re crafty like that. Coffee was everywhere, and chocolate made a fair showing as well. My favorite though was the oil. We saw olive oil (and associated products) from Palestine, and it made me wish we were shopping for ourselves. For local food, we found a number of gift-worthy things produced locally at the farmer’s market in the next room. Honey, salsa, pickles, spicy awesomeness in a jar, and meat sticks (if you’re into that sort of thing) from any animal you could think of to kill. Food gifts can be a good way to make sure that your gift is used, as long as people don’t save it “for a special occasion” for years. Except the meat sticks. Those things might be good to save for the apocalypse.
The ultimate food gift might just be a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) membership. As this post about Soul Food Farm makes clear, people can get very attached to their food and the people who create it. I’ve gotten attached to just the idea that I KNOW who grows my food. I can’t say I’ve bonded with that specific farm, but I’ll stick with CSAs in general just to have the chance to support a farm directly.
Wearables
Wool sweaters priced at $10 each made me wonder about the fair-tradeyness (and research has been done on the phenomenon of how people feel about cheap fair trade items), but there were scarves and hats galore from all over the world as well as, again, raw materials in the form of yarn. The mohair was tempting, but I have to remember that I’ll have access to yak when I get to Shangri-la.
Computers
What? Yeah, these weren’t at the fair trade bazaar. But if you’re reading this you have one, and guess what? It’s possible to support small business when you get a new one. My next computer, hopefully purchased next week, will be this little lady from Zareason. I’m just waiting for the pink case to be back in stock. It was an easy decision for me. I wanted Linux on a netbook, and I wanted support from humans. I’ve already had very pleasant interactions with two actual humans who 1. might be reading this, but don’t that keep you from believing me, and 2. I intend to stay in touch with. I was lucky to happen upon a link in the Ubuntu forums a month or so ago.
Services/Experiences
Ah, the clutter-free gift. A massage, a ride in a hot-air balloon, a free appointment with a cleaning lady — all gifts that support a local business and don’t gather any dust. They create feelings and memories. This is something I will keep in mind when I’m in China. In Shangri-la, many big companies have come in from the larger cities to get their “share” of the new tourism cash flow. Buses take the place of a donkey rental, restaurants take the place of food stalls, and the locals who have lived their whole life there are left out of the game. If I hire a guide, I will hire a local guide, and I will eat local food to the extent my unfortunate dietary restrictions allow.
Reaching Local and Fair Trade Perfection
Um, yeah, not there yet. And a story on NPR yesterday reminded me what a horrible person I am for wanting a Kindle to take with me to China. Local booksellers are all but gone, and even Borders is tanking as more people buy books on Amazon. But I read voraciously when I travel, and I’ve been in Asian bookstores before. One in Koronadal (South Cotabato, Mindanao, Philippines) had ONE book in English, which happened to be a novel I hadn’t yet read. I finished it in two days.
I try, I really do. And I want you to try too. But it will be an interesting and hilarious phenomenon when suddenly “Made in China” becomes a local product.
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