Dear Starbucks
It’s official, I have sought refuge in the Chiang Mai Starbucks. Now first I will give you a moment to get over the shock that there actually exists a Starbucks in Chiang Mai. OK.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t come here, but the weather sucks (apparently monsoon season came early this year, lucky me!), I was in a bad mood, and I couldn’t get Ashley’s words from a recent email out of my head, “don’t forget to treat yourself to a Starbucks (she has been here).” I must admit, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief and joy sweep over me along with the cool heavily air-conditioned air as I stepped through the door. The building is strikingly modern, resembling nothing like the semi-third world scene of chaos just outside. As the all too familiar smell of Starbucks espresso hit my nose, a tear of joy ran down my face. I looked up at the menue wide eyed and drolling. What was I going to get?! Would it be the mocha frappuccino? The cinnemon dolce late? Or maybe old faithful, the caramel macchiato…oh the choices! This sadly, was one of the most exciting moments of my miserably rainy day so far.
The amazing thing about being inside the Starbucks is that stepping through the door is just like stepping through a porthole to the Western world. If I didn’t look out the window, there’s no way I wouldn’t think that I were anywhere but an average American Starbucks. After being in Chiang Mai for a week, where the third world has sort of collided with the modern world, it is a relief to escape the noise and never ending strange smells to this quiet, calm coffee sanctuary. I feel more like I am in Seattle than Thailand.
It’s quite funny, and I guess evidence to the fact that we live in a very globalized world, but I can recal a few other moments in cities around the world where I have sought refuge in a Starbucks (or maybe this is just a strange thing I do). Dunedin, New Zealand is my most memorable. The scene was remarkably similar, only I was four years younger and stressed out over an economics final I should have been studying for. I was sick of the rain and sick of the town, and yet somehow being in Starbucks drinking coffee and writing in my journal made me feel better. Maybe Starbucks isn’t the sworn enemy afterall……..
Part of the reason I had avoided Starbucks so far, aside from the obvious fact that it isn’t really a part of Thai culture, is because I have “quit” drinking coffee. I had my last and most delicious cappuccino in Italy the morning I left for Thailand. There were two reasons why this was to be my last. First, why even bother consuming coffee outside of Italy, there’s simply no comparison. Second, I am supposed to eliminate caffine, along with a few of my other favorite things, from my diet starting one month before the yoga retreat I am doing in Bali, now two weeks away. Oooopps! However I think that if it was a choice between no coffee or my sanity, the Balianese yogis would let this one slide, just this once. I mean I’m only having a tripple venti carmel macchiato (extra caramel please)!
So just what is it that makes Starbucks so comforting? Well for one, if you are a coffee lover, it’s basically your gas station. I believe however, there’s something more to it than just feeding the addiction. No matter where you are in the world, they always have that same calm mix of music playing. It’s similar to elevator music in the sense that it serves as background noise, but it’s a few steps above in the sense that it’s not so bad it ends up pissing you off. It’s always that same blend of jazzy, happy, calm, uplifting stuff that never fails to soothe the soul. Second to the music is the layout. Every Starbucks in the world has the same furnature, the same procedure – order/pay here, they write on the cup with a black sharpie, shout something to the person behind the espresso machine, then pick up over there. The same groups of people are in every Starbucks ’round the globe, holding their cute little (or in my case enormous) white plastic cups, sipping their various caffinated delights, and chatting about this and that. It’s the sameness that makes Starbucks so comforting (and so freaky all at the same time). If I ever find myself in a Russian Starbucks where the man behind the counter wears one of those tall fury hats and asks me if I would like a shot of Shmirnoff along with my extra shot of espresso, I will totally freak out!
So thank you Starbucks, thank you (you massive evil coorporation you!), for bringing me back to familiarity even if only for a moment. And please, don’t ever change. Except maybe tell the Thai Starbucks to get with the times and print those cheesy little inspirational quotes on the back of their cups. I really dig those.
(Can you tell I have a lot of time on my hands? I am now writing short stories about Starbucks…..this could get ugly.)
Master Poo
For the past few days since ariving in Northern Thailand, I’ve found myself wondering exactly what it was that brought me here. I had an intuition that I should come here. Part of that came from my desire to learn Thai Massage. But there was something else, something I knew I would discover once I got here. Today, my question was answered. It began with a quest to find a man by the name of Ajarn Poo.
Ajarn is Thai for “master.” Yes, this man’s name is Master Poo. Master Poo is a “healer” who lives in Chiang Mai. However, it’s more accurate to say that Master Poo is a healer who is hidden in Chiang Mai. He has no phone, no internet, speaks very little English, and lives somewhere outside the main city of Chiang Mai. The only way I knew of this man was from the first person who ever gave me a Thai Massage, Simon Park. When I told Simon that I was coming to Chiang Mai to study massage, he told me that I must go see Master Poo, and so my quest began. Through some research and random contacts I found the one and only way to Master Poo; a tuktuk driver by the name of Roon. Roon is apparently the only man who seems to know where Master Poo lives. I recruited a Thai woman who spoke Enlish well enough to understand me to use a payphone and call Roon to see if he would pick me up and take me to Master Poo’s house. I was half expecting this not to actually work out, but much to my surprise, as I walked out onto the street the next morning, there was Roon, in by far the oldest tuktuk in town, patiently waiting for me.
Roon’s tuktuk is like a personal shrine. Various photos, pieces of paper, and knicknacks cover the inside. It is so old that every time we stopped for more than two seconds, the thing would shut down. But Roon would simply look in the rear view mirror, give me a huge grin, and start that bad boy right on up again! I liked Roon instantly.
We drove for about 15 minutes out of town, through backroads, never seeming to go straight for more than a few seconds. I laughed to myself at how I had originally considered trying to find this place on foot. Then I saw a small old yellow sign with an arrow that said “Ancient Healing Massage,” and we were there.
Roon walked me up to the front door where, in true Thai tradition, we removed our shoes. A man no taller than five feet appeared in the door. Clasping his palms together in the prayr position he bowed and greeted Roon then myself. I too clasped my palms together and said “sawadee ka” which means hello in Thai. It felt more like I was praying there with my hands pressed together, “please please please be Master Poo,” rather than saying hello, but my wishes were me, it was indeed him. He asked me why I had come, and I explained how I suffered from back and shoulder pain from an old ski injury. “Ski” he did not understand, so I used my hands to show “mountain” and then “go down.” Now he understood, but he looked at me like “why the hell would you do that? what did you think would happen?”
Then he looked at my feet for about three minutes, and somehow he knew it all from that. He explained to me in very broken English exactly what I had been experiencing, what would happen over the next five years if it went untreated, and what he needed to do in order to fix me. He grabed a huge binder full of drawings and detailed maps of the human body, some of which looked to be over one hundred years old. This book is a dream come true for anyone who likes anatomy (I know what you are thinking now, what a dork!! I was almost drooling over the thing.) Then using some of the drawings he pointed to where, “there is problem” in my body. He told me that he thought he could treat me in 5-6 sessions which would be carried out over the next three weeks. I thanked him, said goodbye, and hopped back in the tuktuk feeling as if I had just stepped out of some mystic fairytale, yet really I was just stepping in.
A few hours later I found myself having yet another facinating experience with Eastern Medicine. A girl I had met in my first and only day of Thai Massage School (yes, I am officially a Thai Massage School drop-out!) told me about her experience with a Chineese Medicine Man. Chineese Medicine, like Thai Massage, focuses on the energy flows in the body. Its goal is to balance out the yin and yang energies, which are apparently all out of whack in most people these days for a number of reasons, namely our fast paced modern lifestyles. I was intrigued though, and wondered how out of whack my yin and yang might be….and if they could become balanced again, hmmmm what might that be like ?!! Ironically, I stumbled on a Chinese Medicine place the next day. Inspired by the recent conversation, I couldn’t resist checking it out.
The facility was beautiful with gardens everywhere, most of which were growing the medicinal herbs they use. When I found out it would cost me the equivalent of about $5 to be seen, I signed right up. The next day, a few hours after my magical Master Poo experience, I sat in the “waiting room” which was a garden, with my shoes off (Thai style), driking some tea. This was by far the best experience anyone could ever imagine having at the doctor’s office! Then I was led to a room to meet with the Medicine Man, who to my surprise, was a woman. She asked me a few questions, and was very excited and intrigued by the fact that I was a Pilates teacher. “You must teach here in Chiang Mai!” she said, “So good for people here.” A lovely idea, though fairly unlikely. Then she held my wrists for a while and looked at them in much the same way Poo had done when he looked at my feet, as if they held the secret to life. Diagnosis?? My yang energy was all out of whack, there was a blockage. The energy line that runs from the Kidney (but also the whole length of the body) was not flowing correctly, or virtually at all. “Accupuncture” she said.
Now, you must first understand that I am deathly afraid of needles. I actually passed out in the Aspen doctor’s office when I was getting the shots for this very trip. Now here I was, in a boarderline third world country, agreeing to be stuck head to toe with needles. But there was something in the way she spoke to me, I knew it would be worth my time to give this a whirl, never mind the fact that as you lay there you are a virtual human voodoo doll.
I got stuck with five needles in total. One in the ancle, three in the back, and one in the neck. Then I was told to lay and “take a nice rest.” “Yeah right,” I thought, “Like I’m actually going to fall asleep with all of these things stuck in me?” I was out in less than five minutes. I awoke to the calm voice of my Chinese Medicine woman, of whom I decided was equally as mythical as Master Poo. They must have been born on the same island of “really cool mythical people.” “How are you miss Kate?” she asked. “Good” I said. Then she proceded to hold a stalk of burning herbs over me, moving up and down my body, and circling the smoke around like a dance. I still have no idea what that was about. “Ok miss Kate,” she said when she was finished, “you come back Friday,” and I was on my way, feeling light as a feather!
There is something very hard about grasping and accepting Eastern Medicine for Westerners. First of all, it’s completely opposite in just about every way. Western Medicine looks for the “quick fix” because that’s what the consumers demand due to our fast paced lives. Easter Medicine in contrast looks at the root; what is the cause of the problem? How can you prevent it from happening again? One of the things I find so facinating about Eastern Medicine is the fact that it dates back a few thousand years. The world has changed an incomprehensible amount since then, and yet Eastern Medicine is still around, much the same. I don’t need much more proof than that to think that there must be some merit to this stuff.
As our healthcare system in the US continues to fall apart, and we become a nation who relies on prescription drugs just as much as we rely on oil, we will begin to see that this is an unsustainible and unhealthy way of living. I believe that as this become more evident, you will see a shift away from Western Medicine towards more Eastern methods. While by many definitions the “East” is still the land of developing nations far behind their western counterparts. However, in some ways, particularily certain aspects of medicine, they may be way ahead. Just look at the popularity of yoga over the past 20 years.
And so it is my mission while here in Northern Thailand to learn and experience as much as I can about Eastern Medicine, the history behind it, and the culture surrounding it. To me, it is one of the most facinating things out there.
Traveler
So here I am, or there I was; nearly 40,000 feet in the air, playing solitaire on my personal TV screen, drinking cup fulls of airplane red wine in hopes that I will slip into a wine coma and miraculously awake in Chiang Mai without even the slightest hint of a sore neck. Far bellow we pass over Iran, Kabul (Afghanistan), a sliver of Packistan, and now we are just East of Dehli, India. Despite the feeling that it is nightime inside the plane, there is daylight outside. I raise my window cover and press my forehead to the glass. The landscape bellow is brown, grey, and desolate. I marvel at how people have managed to survive on this land for so many years. Even from thousands of feet above, I can tell that life is not easy down there. It feels sureal watching it all pass by from the comfort of the Boeing 777. The modern technology of the plane seems very out of place in contrast to the rustic dwellings and rural villages bellow.
While the other passengers sleep, my imagination keeps me awake wondering what daily life is like for those people. As we cross deeper into Northern India, the electronic map shows Kathamandu and Mt. Everest in the distance. My legs begin to twitch. Just being near Kathamandu is exciting for me. I have wanted to go there since I first saw a photograph about ten years ago showing hundreds of spinning prayr wheels. I immediately start fanticising about my next trip……Nepal, Tibet, India…..I am eternally lured by the adventure of travel.
I have now been travelling for 25 hours, changed planes 4 times, and logged 17 hours of airtime. It sounds exhausting and like a bit of a hassle. There is an “oversized” man to my right whose body is neglecting to stay within the confinements of his seat. With every five minutes that pass, his snoring rises a notch in volume while his head drops a notch in height, directly towards my right shoulder. Yet, I couldn’t be happier. No mater what challenges and discomforts we face while traveling, they all contribute to the complexity and greatness of the adventure as a whole. Each moment stacks up, one ontop of the next, adding another layer of emotions and experience. When you finally make it somewhere, see something you never thought you’d see, do something you never thought you’d do, you are so happy to be there you could kiss the ground (and should, its quite fun). Then you realize it was worth everything it took to get there.
Slowly the wine coma comes on. I drift off to dreams of a thousand adventures. Suddenly, I realize I am awake. My dreams have come true, I am just about to begin yet another adventure………”Welcome to Thailand” the womans voice says over the loudspeaker, “Sawadee Ka.”
