Pause and Rewind - Who is actually reading this?

This week I got my 20,000 hit. Of course I was tracking it and for a moment felt a sense of achievement. After all, I've been read on over 20,000 different occasions now which feeds my ambitions of being the next Roald Dahl. Except for that if I reflect on my own reading habits, I rarely get to the end of a reading a blog post so I'm not sure how much I actually am read? Trying to work out why people end up at maximobo.com, I looked at the search items that were sending people to the blog page:

In the past month, the series of posts that I wrote about my 2010 trip  to India have scored me a lot of hits. Likewise, the blogs on my wedding which I seemingly did well to name after an awful Hollywood film. Not sure about "piss man", and how that relates to what I've previously written and I don't even want to know how I appear on the search list for grandmaf**k. Regardless of that (hopefully random, like this week's search item that I also have of "baby tigger tackes poo"), it is flattering as I do write to be read.

But this is about as far as it goes. A friend who is an ex-editor told me that their main line of rejection is "go write a blog", and she was polite enough after reading this to say that I was "funny" but that I should continue to "write a blog"... Except for that when newspapers copy my ideas, such as last month when upon being prescribed glasses for the first time in my life, I reflected on the likelihood of me not winning a tennis grandslam because I'm close to 30. This has subsequently been picked up by the New York Times. So I can pretend that the only thing preventing me from really getting read, is a ready source of quotes. I better get my quotes soon as the New York Times article confirms that the chance of a tennis career is really over.

As the demands that professional players face continue to increase, Ferreira said, “You’re going to see the tennis career start narrowing a bit, maybe 19, 20 to 29, 30.

Pause & Rewind: Reviewing Beer

My high-school best friend likes hobbies apparently. I don't always remember this being the case and we spent a considerable amount of our spare time together during that period playing brass instruments and Playstation. What I do remember is playing Fifa '99 on the Playstation (it didn't have a number then), him playing as Iran and being 4-0 up at half time, and me playing as Fiorentina and winning 5-4. That is another blog post however.

One of his current hobbies is to blog about beer, which he does so succesfully that he has breweries in the UK sending him free samples to review. This week's blog is my first contribution as a guest post.

 Repressed, Semi-precious, Dubious, Lingering, #2

What is amusing is that if it hadn't been posted now, a lot of the cliches would have been out of date considering how quickly the country is moving forwards politically. Off to the 7/11 to get some San Miguel to review Filipino beer (I like this hobby!).

Planning a Wedding: What Goes on Tour...

I'm not sure whether it is correct to conditionally invite guests to your wedding? Anyhow, one high-school friend whose blog is the main reason why this site exists did get one:

We did actually send proper invites, so it wasn't all done via facebook...

My friend agreed, and so got invited, and now the resultant blog post is out. A romantic tale of five adventurous British men, train journeys down to the Cote D'Azur, long beach walks, breakfast dates and teaching other countries how to play new sports (Beer Pong). Actual romance is lacking, but I think the rule of "what goes on tour..." was applied by the censorship board.

Do not approach these men. 

And in the end, the trip ended with:

5 nights in Aix-en-Provence celebrating the Anglo-French union of a successful compadre to a delightful fille française. But I wouldn’t want to sully that with the drunken ravings of Wing Command. Suffice to say, now that the group has had the Stag Do to end all dos and the wedding to end all those, it’s now not worth doing either. 

The "wedding to end all the stag dos". Beat that!

Travelling in... Myanmar: Ngapali Beach

My issue with the Bay of Bengal is that it is basically the emptying point for water that started out pristine in the Himalayas, but has since descended through some of the dirtiest countries and cities in the world. Living in Dhaka and smelling the sulphuric wretchedness of the Buriganga (don’t worry, it goes away in the monsoon), or seeing the body disposal that takes place in the Ganges in Varanasi and Bagmati in Kathmandu, you don’t feel like swimming in the place where it all empties in to the sea. It’s not like the industrial waste, human sewage and dead body parts have managed to go anywhere other than downstream.

The Bay of Bengal also invokes memories of Bangladesh, where going for a swim in the sea entailed entering the water fully dressed, amidst an ever present small crowd of earnest onlookers who equally did not want you to go too deep in case you drowned because they couldn’t swim. And don’t even think about finding a cold beer near the beach.

Ngapali Beach in Myanmar changed all of that. According to Google maps it is only several hundred kilometres from the infamous Cox’s Bazaar, but distance counts for little here. You may as well be on a different continent the place is so relaxing, to the point that you don’t care if you’re frolicking South Asia’s principal sewage outlet.

View Larger Map

Arrival to Ngapali Beach is inevitably on a small internal flight which deposits you on a runway that directly meets the sea making for an exciting landing. You pass through the garden shed (possibly a veranda as I don’t remember any doors) of a terminal which helps to confirm the sense of removal from the rest of the world, and get on a bus to your hotel. The bus is from your hotel as there isn’t any other transport: Ngapali Beach is not the kind of place where you turn up without a reservation. Not so much because it is an exclusive location that is always fully booked. It’s because apart from having a hotel reservation, there is nothing else to have here.

Not much happening to the left

This is the real beach getaway with no distractions: no clubs, shopping malls (we only found one shop), no internet unless you go looking for it and have the patience of a saint, no cultural shows, no traffic. Literally the hotel, beach, and whatever you brought with you. In our case that was the snorkeling kits we’ve been carrying with us for the three years we’ve been in Asia, but have never used.

On our first evening, whilst sat trying to decide what time was justifiable to start drinking cocktails, a local man came to us offering the chance to go on his boat and snorkel on some reefs. So the next morning we set off late (we started cocktail hour early) and on a boat whose motor cut out every so often. That wasn’t an issue: the sun was pounding down and we had some excellent snorkeling with good visibility and lots of fish to distract us. Unfortunately, once the late monsoon storm set in and we tried to sail back to the hotel, the motor cut out once again.

It wasn’t life threatening, but we did require towing back to shore by the other tourist boat that had been hired by some Chinese fishermen (apparently that was our boat, but because we had set off late they took it).

Not much happening to the right either

So we took refuge back at the hotel, eating more seafood, watching crazy sunsets, drinking more cocktails and reading entire books.  It wasn’t like there was anywhere else to go but we weren’t complaining.

Pause & Rewind: Learning to say "Yes"

Two separate stories that taught me to say yes.

#1: In the winter of 2007 a very good friend and I went on a trip to Uzbekistan. We visited the historic silk road towns of Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkhand, went horse-riding in the snowy mountains and found the most incredibly Georgian restaurant during a particularly intense blizzard in Tashkent whilst trying to tour the National Railway Museum. Basically there was a lot to do during the day, but in the night we were faced with freezing temperatures, the same dinner (meat and soup), and endless power cuts. So like any young males in that part of the world looking to pass away the evening exploring their existential angst whilst wearing two layers of insulated full-body underwear we turned to vodka. At the start of the trip we shared a 300 gram (300ml) bottle and by the end we deteriorated to the point of a full litre. I remember nothing of what we shared on those evenings (though my friend meticulously documented them on his digital camera) except for that I was accused of being too “negative”, and finding it too easy to say “no”. I’ve never managed to shake that off.

#2: Growing up in my dad’s house we had two cats who I loved very much. They died, and I was very sad (I cried when the first died). Those cats were replaced by some street rehabilitated, middle-aged cats that promptly grew obese and daily vomited on my bed. Obviously I did not warm to them. Somehow, that earned me a reputation as an anti-Dr Doolittle: the man who hated animals. Accepting a turtle in to my home for two years in Bangladesh apparently wasn’t enough to overcome this, and my wife’s pleas to take in the stray ginger cat that kept on sleeping in our garage here in Yangon fell on my deaf ears.

A fortnight ago I received an e mail offering two kittens, the perfect excuse to demonstrate both that I am not too “negative”, and also that I do love animals (or at least that I tolerate them). Inevitably my wife agreed immediately to getting a kitten triggering a panic from me as to whether we could look after it considering how much we are travelling at the moment with work. My panic was answered with the response that I summarized as being: "cats are selfish look after themselves and so don’t demand much attention." So why are we getting one again?

So far I've taught the cat how to pose provocatively

A month later I am an emotional mess. My daily routine now starts with a game of hide-and-seek with Matilda from the kitchen where I am preparing our packed lunches into the living room. At night I go to the road works at the end of our street and steal industrial quantities of sand for the cat litter. The cat litter itself stinks after several days and the cleaner is clearly refusing to deal with it. When getting some stocks for our Christmas lunch in Bangkok recently, the first item I bought was a tuna and scallops gourmet cat food for Matilda. And we now have several hours footage of the cat sleeping, playing air guitar to George Brassens (apparently she has more of a French music taste than British) and chasing the squeaky-mouse-toy-on-elastic-toy which if we’re honest brings us more pleasure than the cat.

Squeaky-mouse-toy-on-elastic-toy - still alive

I spoke to my traveler friend recently to present him with the new, more positive me. He asked as to who I was saying yes for, and whether it was for the right reasons. I accused him of being negative and went to play with Matilda and Punk Rat.

Punk Rat after a mauling

Pause & Rewind: Specky Four Eyes

As a child I was always proud of the fact that I didn’t get nosebleeds (in hindsight my half of my primary school class must have been hemophiliacs as I’ve never been in a such a large group of people who had daily nosebleeds), and I didn’t wear glasses (e.g. my eyes worked).  At the age of 29 I have now let down my childhood self, though I’ve still never once had a nosebleed.

I was sat at work in a meeting, squinting at the powerpoint presentation 10 metres away. I couldn’t read a thing, and naturally assuming that my eyes were perfect I consulted my neighbours who told me they had no such issue. I assumed it was a bad joke on their part, insisting that I should get my eyes checked, until everyone stopped laughing. Thankfully the room was mostly full of strangers as I would have otherwise ignored them and gone to the projector and focused it to my own (inferior) optical requirements in the false belief my belief that my body is infallible.

I’m not going to start blogging on my fears of ageing until I pass 30, but right now I’m in a vulnerable place: my body is fallible. What started as a slight suspicion formed during this year’s Roland Garos that I am now older than most of the top male tennis players, has now turned into the realization that not only will I not have time to train for and win a Grand Slam because all my competitors would have the benefit of youth on their side, but also I because I would also not be able to see the ball. 

Since my first day at work in Tajikistan, aged 24, I’ve had to convince everyone that I was older than I appeared (mainly by not opening my mouth). Now that I wear glasses, I have to argue to convince people that I am the youngest in the office. The rapid onset of blindness is even affecting my sense of humour. My colleague noted that I was wearing new glasses and I responded that working in the humanitarian sector was like masturbating: if you do too much of it you go blind. Apparently they don’t have that saying in Indonesia.

Wearing glasses does have its benefits. The new HD TV which we bought a month ago has suddenly got even more HD. Actually that’s the only benefit I can think of. How are you supposed to select your first pair of glasses at the age of 29? It’s like redefining a personal style which I never had in the first place. It takes me several days to choose a new pair of shoes, yet these things are supposed to go on my feet.  No matter how many different styles I tried on, I either look like Sven Goran Erikson or Dennis Taylor. In desperation I googled “George Clooney + glasses” and guess what: there is not a single photo of George Clooney wearing corrective lenses. Game Over.

Glasses even make my Macbook Pro look crap

I try to use them dramatically to emphasise a strong or clever point during discussions at work. The problem is that whilst waving and pointing them around the room either drop them, or smudge the lenses and so have to go through the laborious process of polishing the lenses. Every morning I go through a five minute routine of finding my watch, wallet and house keys which drives my wife crazy. Now my glasses have added another two minutes to that ordeal. And how come no one has invented glasses that don’t steam up when you drink a hot cup of tea?

My life is over.

Yangon Days - Full Moon of Tazaungmone

For weeks now there have been money and kitchen utensil collections in the streets around Yangon, all leading up to the celebration of the Full Moon of Tazaungmone. Apart from it being an auspicious day, I still don't know what it celebrates exactly and my colleague could not explain. She said there would be a lot of monks walking around in the night (I think she meant there would be a weaving ceremony) followed by lots of people making offerings at dawn. So in the same spirit in which I visited Varanasi in India last year (i.e. no idea what is going on, and the feeling that it is not possible to explain without living it) and with no idea of when dawn is, I woke up at 4:00 am to visit the Shwedagon Pagoda to see what all the fuss was about.

Doesn't anyone go to sleep in this country?

Panicking slightly that I had woken up very early for no reason, it quickly became clear something serious was happening when at the foot of the hill taking you up to the northern and western entrances to the Pagoda, the traffic was doubled up and people were pouring out. I weaved my way up on my bike, locked my sandals and bike together to avoid a repetition of the last time I visited a sacred religious site, and forced my way in.

Buddha's breakfast

The place was packed with whole families sleeping on mats, groups sat in the smaller temples chanting, a lot of people doing their individual prayers and offerings of fruit salad to Buddha, and some extreme candle lighting. I couldn't see any weaving, though the Shwedagon is so huge that unless they did in the main area I wouldn't be able to find it.

After three tours round the pagoda, chased by the ladies with the rubbish cart, the whole place momentarily came to life with a long procession of women offering gifts of robes and food led by some bells and a conch horn and even louder chanting to a tune. Even the entrance ticket collectors emerged and caught me out.

And by 5:15am the monks had all woken up and were doing the rounds collecting alms. I had not change on me, nor any fruit salad, so I wasn't able to offer anything although the majority of monks did ask. And so feeling awkward, tired (I had work in 3 1/2 hours), and reflecting that this was the Buddhist equivalent of midnight mass, I cycled home. And now I know that dawn in Myanmar is at about 05:30.

I don't think they had work the next day