The Battle Rages On

Ugh, I haven't updated this in forever. I keep doing that, not-updating. Yes, very Zen, but not very entertaining.

We returned to the States one day after our third wedding anniversary and one day before my 41st birthday. ...No, I can't believe I'm that old either. Thanks, I don't feel I look it either. Very kind of you. Since returning I find some of my former passions somewhat diminished: I've completely slacked off on my photo-a-day blog since I don't feel anything I can do here will be as interesting as the last six months (not very generous, I know), and I've altogether stopped writing postcards or any kind of postal correspondence.

That latter is especially a crime, considering my love for this medium. Indeed, 85% of polled Americans say the USPS is their favorite federal department. (In return, the USPS says it's losing money and will have to declare bankruptcy and shut down in ten years. Can you imagine? I seriously cannot.) But after sending postcards from southeast Asia, complete with exotic and interesting postage stamps and postmarks using the Buddhist calendar instead of the U.S.'s Christian reckoning... what can compare? "Hi, I'm in Minnesota, here's a funny little card about a regional delicacy we call 'hotdish.'" "Greetings from Minnesota, we have a lot of lakes and even more mosquitos, if you can believe it." "Hello, guess who just discovered his cache of Forever stamps?"

That's not kind, I know, and it's not right. Writing a letter or a postcard is valuable no matter the origin. People love getting personal missives in the mail, period. Even moreso now, as it's increasingly attaining "novelty" status. I'm hoping I'll get over this blue funk and get back to writing regularly.

I did just finish a letter, in fact. This weekend sees the 80th birthday of my favorite author, Gene Wolfe. I've written him before and I wrote him today. I wished him a happy birthday, I apologized for not being able to visit him at the sci-fi convention in Wisconsin last September (that really crushed me, but we were packing up to leave the country and I had no free time), and I tried to share the most interesting anecdotes from our travels. Most other authors I admire to such a pronounced degree have passed on decades or centuries ago. It was imperative that I got over my shyness in the face of his auspiciousness and pen a letter of appreciation, the first time, before it was no longer an option. I've since urged anyone who'll listen to do the same.

And, truth be told, Minneapolis does have some awesome postcards. There's a big indie art scene here and some prominent creators have generated really excellent clothing, artwork, and stationery. This place is worthy of some "local pride" and investing in these artists' works is beneficial all the way around. For that sake, I love sending out postcards to my friends in diaspora--even though it discourages me that few of them have any interest in responding (some couldn't be arsed to send an e-mail or even a quick note on Facebook that they'd received my postcards from abroad). But that shouldn't be my motivation to write. Getting something in return is a terrible motivation to do something you love. The fact that I've selected a suitable pen, sought out an attractive postcard or writing set, and practiced several hundreds of hours of handwriting to create a little message to let a friend know I've been thinking of them should be the end unto itself.

My reasons to not-write are flimsy, and the reasons to write are multifarious. My path is clear, and the momentum to follow it is imminent, I just have to become the action. I will, I am.

Post Office in Narita, Japan

No great and high-falutin story with this one. We were in Japan for a seven-hour layover, between Jakarta and Minneapolis, so we got out of the airport and toured a calligraphy museum in Narita. The curator spoke almost no English but tried to explain to us the first floor was only an exhibit of high school students practicing kanji in Japanese and Chinese--the good and ancient stuff was upstairs. She also declined to make eye contact and rather than coming off as rude it was somehow adorable.

After touring an actual Japanese garden, we tried winding our way back through the streets to the bus station (we'd taken a taxi to the museum but the station wasn't far at all). When we got stuck at one point I called out to a nearby teen who was walking by with his head respectfully down. "Sumimasen," I was able to forage from my scant Japanese, "Narita-eki wa doko desu ka?" I felt proud of myself but then the instructions, naturally, came to me in Japanese which I couldn't understand. I did get his hand gestures, and we found our way back in plenty of time to go back through passport registration and catch our flight.

But before that, we wrote quick notes to ourselves on postcards from the calligraphy museum, and I mailed them to ourselves at this airport post office.

Post Office in Melaka, Malaysia

Just had to stop in here briefly, just like we did the town and even the entire country. What does that mean?

We weren't planning on going to Malaysia at all, but then we found ourselves with extra time and so we did. Kuala Lumpur is a gorgeous, clean, modern city and we enjoyed our time there. Georgetown, on Penang Island, is a fascinating mix of world cultures, rich with history and liberally sprinkled with excellent restaurants everywhere you turn.

But here in Malacca, or Melaka as originally written, what was there? We made friends with a woman from KL who said that Melaka could be seen in a day at most. But she lived in KL and all her friends could find to do was party, so perhaps there was more to it than that. Indeed, just in driving around we saw some fascinating landmarks and intriguing neighborhoods. By dinner time we asked the owner of our hotel where to eat and he said, "You walk down this street and if you want Chinese, turn left. If you want Pakistani, turn right." We did both and ate very well that night.

Right before we left I knocked out a few more postcards and, eager to take advantage of Malaysia gift-from-heaven postal rates, ran across town to this post office.

My Fear Is They Already Do

Post Office in Tanah Rata, Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

Several hours north of Kuala Lumpur, capitol city of Malaysia, is a series of mountains covered in jungle, tea plantations, and intermittent villages. One of these regions is called the Cameron Highlands (colonization provides the trade-off of sounding less indigenous but gaining mercantile augmentation), and within these is a very cute little town called Tanah Rata.

Here, you wake up to glorious sunrises in which you feel the Buddha smiles upon you, then the mists descend around the mountain tops, and around 1 PM you are drenched in several hours of rain. That's just how it is and the locals are well acclimated to it.

Note: I'm not local. Traipsing around in my fancy-dancy rain jacket is insufficient to the climate, as another couple hours of soaked jeans and Chuck Taylors will testify.

But here I am in Tanah Rata's post office, sending out another batch of postcards, and I want to note something significant here. Just as Norway was a very unpleasant postage rate surprise, Malaysia is the spectral opposite: there are three ringgit to the USD, each ringgit is 100 sen, and one postcard stamp to the US is 50 sen. Seriously! It only costs about USD 16.5¢ to send a postcard to the States from Malaysia! The postcards are more expensive than the postage, and these aren't expensive postcards!

Does my joy seem inordinate, untoward? I beg to differ: postage for five postcards from Norway was US$16, and while the postage rate in Indonesia fluctuated within a margin of 100%, its travel time was equally unpredictable. My friends are only just now receiving postcards I sent from Bali, three months after the fact. Yet I mailed a letter from Kuala Lumpur to my niece and she received it within two weeks, easy.

Vacationers to SE Asia: do your friendly correspondence in Malaysia. It feels like finding $20 on the ground.

Post Office in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Oh, folks! Check me out: I'm in a Cambodian post office!

Khmer mail collection box.

I held off from writing any postcards for a while because it was getting spendy and I was writing far too many of them. But you know me, I love writing letters, I believe in availing myself of the formal postal system. It's not that I'm above e-mails: I've written e-mails to friends in times of need, just to keep in touch, stuff like that. And while e-mail's advantages include speed, efficiency, velocity, and promptness, they cannot compare in the least way to actually holding a postcard that you just got in the mail. They can't compare to regarding the exotic stamps commemorating people and events you've never heard of, to looking at the date and realizing it's been traveling for a month, to examining every bend in the card or scrape in the photo and wondering in which country these physical traces were rendered.

Main Post Office, Siem Reap, Cambodia

But my wife agreed it was time to send out another batch, as we've been in Cambodia for a week. We were several days in Phnom Penh, the capitol, and are now holing up in Siem Reap (trans.: "the defeat of Thailand"). We have visited the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, as well as many of the temples around Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. We have tried amok and lok lak (the latter is my favorite), we have stumbled with wrapping our tongues around Khmer phrases (ch'ngain, "delicious," is the hardest), and we bought two packs of postcards. One is for writing, but the other is a novelty. Everywhere we go, children are trying to sell us stuff: bracelets, postcards, books, toys, doohickeys, baubles, gewgaws, etc. We need none of these, but instead give them a dollar if they will draw us a picture, and we use the back of a blank postcard for their canvas. This places the illustration in a specific location for us, and what I've noticed is that girls in Phnom Penh like to draw flowers and butterflies, while girls in Siem Reap prefer mountains and rivers. Why is that?

Action shot: a postal clerk hand-franks my postcards.

Okay, so, Lonely Planet was correct, for once, in its placement of the main post office on its map, and it even... I won't say "taught me a new word," but it did remind me of one I'd forgotten a long time ago: franking. When they take that little hammer and bump it in the ink and thwack it on your stamps to make a postmark, that is called franking the postage. It comes from the verb "to frank" and means marking stamps with a postmark to show the time/date of their submission to post.

Franking. Totally forgot that word, but I won't again.

Post Office in Luang Prabang, Laos

New country, new post office! Welcome to the interior of the official post office in Luang Prabang, Laos, kitty-corner from Wat Chon Si. If you were here, you'd know this temple wherever you stood in the city, regardless of knowing its name. It's the huge, ancient temple mounted atop the most enormous hill in the center of town. Over 300 steps to reach the top, just to see a spectacular sunset each night...

I digress. I'd written a stack of postcards and even a letter, all going out around the world. I confess I feel a certain glow of warmth whenever I have a stack of mail to go out and it's not all in the US. Having pen pals around the world to at least drop a line to (currently I have no mailing address for myself) makes me feel like I've expanded myself a little, and sending postcards from other nations is like a special "thank you" I can render to these friends who agreed to correspond with me way back when I wasn't doing anything that interesting.

Of course, this gets to be an expensive habit. Experience has shown me it's much better to e-mail from Norway, as postage rates there will quickly impoverish anyone with more than two people to write to. Thailand and Laos have rates a little closer to US rates, but a pile of cards and letters will still diminish the tidy wad you've just extracted from the ATM, leaving you pretty glum about your prospects for lunch and dinner that day. (Or, in my case, give my wife some reason to ask you to hold off on going crazy with my pastime until we actually have some form of income. Writing letters is cool, but it's not worth having to go home early.)

I don't know that I saw any mailboxes in Luang Prabang. I'm quite sure they were there, I probably didn't recognize them for what they are. I'm including a shot of the exterior of the post office, the slots where I was directed to deposit my own letters. Now, when I was in the States and brought a stack of postcards (I never write a few when a great many will do) to the post office, I was quite accustomed to being handed a strip or card of stamps and affixing them myself to my missives. That was easier in the States, with self-adhesive stickers for postage. In these SE Asian nations, they're still using adhesive you have to lick or moisten to activate, and even that's an imperfect science: my clerk handed me a glue-stick to help tack on some of the lesser stamps that wouldn't hold. So applying two kinds of stamps to each envelope or postcard, when dealing with fifteen of these pieces of outgoing mail, begins to border on the tedious and can soak up a lot of time.

But still it's worth it, because I'm enjoying sending these things out to people... though I wish my recipients were a little more diligent about letting me know they've gotten them. My friends in other nations are, they're great about that, they'll shoot me an e-mail or notify me on Facebook that something turned up. My friends in the States, not so much: I have to assume that either the postcards were lost/destroyed in transit, that the Indonesian infrastructure could not support safe transport of my postcards, or that my friends don't feel any compunction to let me know they got anything. That's a little discouraging, but then, "snail mail" has fallen out of favor in the US and we don't have any traditions or conventions governing that behavior anymore.

Post Office in Pai, Thailand

This was a personal victory for me: I have the opportunity to visit a few nations outside of my own, so I've been making it a personal goal to visit official post offices where I travel. I haven't made it 100% of the time or even 50%, I don't think.

In my other blog, I posted a picture of my visit to a (temporary) post office in Bali, Indonesia. When I was in Iceland I'd only walked back and forth outside a post office in Reykjavik but never made it inside. I regret that a lot. I thought I was going to replay that regret when I finally located the post office in Chiang Mai City, Thailand, but showed up on the one day of the week it was closed.

As it happened, I was visiting Pai for two days and wrote up a bunch of postcards, hanging out at a coffee shop. I figured one of the local convenience stores around here might have some stamps (7-11 is very big in Thailand, the way Circle K was in Indonesia) but anywhere I went was out of them. Pai has a pretty strong independent artists community and its remote geographic location is a popular motif to play upon, whether it's the "762 curves" on highway 1095 between Chiang Mai and Pai or the tiny town's postal code, 58130. There are a lot of beautiful postcards for sale throughout the town, and if there's such a demand for them, perhaps people really were draining all the 7-11s of their postal stamps.

I was directed to the post office (which I was excited about) but finding it was another matter. There were several maps in town but... I don't know if the scale was off or if they were simplified to highlight the local bars and hotels. The map in Lonely Planet was worse than any of those. Rebecca and I wandered around the neighborhood south of Pai proper until she asked some directions from some friendly women at a corner cafe. We took an immediate left and found ourselves in front of the post office--we'd walked that street before on the other side and didn't see it at all. How'd that happen?

Regardless, once inside the process was swift and simple, and I think the postal rate for postcards was more or less equivalent to that in the States. That's convenient, but time will tell whether their postal infrastructure is any better than Indonesia's: only two intended recipients have indicated the cards reached their destination, out of a couple dozen sent to friends around the world. It's too soon to tell whether any of the Thailand-issued cards have arrived, but still I wonder.

Sweet relief: greetings from Pai, Thailand!