Remembering some Thai folklore

I was roaming around the internet looking for posting of this old Southern Thai folklore of Ta Khao Mong-lai that I heard about when I was a kid. The problem is that I don't have Thai character keyboard and am probably misspelling the English transliteration of the name (Thai folks do have weird way of spell their name in English)... 

Ta Khao Mong-lai legend is a local tale linked to the geographical features in Thailand. There is a mountain called Khao Ta Mong-lai (Khao is Thai for 'Mount'), and he has a wife (one of the mountains in Northern Thailand that looks like a woman laying supine with her flowing hair spreading in little mountain ridges, a few strands of which extend into Myanmar). 

I once visited a cabin (more like a bungalow, actually) by the sea close to Mong-lai's supposed house pets, Cat Island and Mouse Island (Koh Maew and Koh Hnu). They are little islets in a half-moon bay that are so closed together that if you walk the length of the bay from east to west while looking at the islets you'd see the cat catching up with the mouse and swallowing it head-first. And if you reverse direction, the cat has a serious case of indigestion and vomits the mouse back out!). I had always loved listening to the locals and their stories, and it was fun riding around the Thai countryside while being narrated this tale and having the different mountains or islands or lakes that inspired the story pointed out to me.

Anyhow... I haven't found that legend online yet (I don't remember much of it now)... but I did find a few other Thai legends/folklores I heard about during my stay in Bangkok in the late 80's. Here is one:

Screenshot from www.myfirstbrain.com

This is Nang Peeseusamood (roughly Madame Oceanbutterfly), a character from the famous Thai epic poem, Pra Apaimanee (พระอภัยมณี). Look rather intimidating, doesn't she? She is a much softer heart than she looks, though. There's a snippet of the poem describing her underneath the cartoon rendition (couldn't cut and paste the Thai writing, so you'll just have to look at it via the photo):

"She, a big-eyed giantess with bad temper ----  Ugly face with polite speech, a misfit!

 the two breasts hanging wild like sarongs ----  even the husband is wary of her unpleasant look."

"Madame Oceanbutterfly is a giantess living in a cave in the middle of the ocean. She can magically transform herself into an enchantingly beautiful woman. In her previous incarnation she was blessed by Vishnu so that she could remove her heart and keep it in a rock for safekeeping. She became arrogant and picked a fight with Fire. Her body was burn by acrid flame, and she became this specter haunting the rock where her heart is kept. Over hundreds of years, the rock that houses her heart sprouted arms, legs, and a face, and eventually sprang into life. One day she spotted Pra Apaimanee and immediately fell in love with him. She took him to live with her at her cave and bore him a son called Sinsamood (Oceantreasure). One day Pra Apaimanee and Sinsamood ran away to shore. Mme Oceanbutterfly followed them out of love, but is killed by Pra Apaimanee's magical recorder playing. She turned into a chunk of stone forever marking the beachhead where she died."

 

Youtube video posted by Saksiri2498

It had been a long time since I read this epic poem, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the same concept used in this really old Thai tale (Suntorn Poo started composing it around 1822) that popped up in the Harry Potter books. Horcrux! Mme Oceanbutterfly lived on after her body was burned to ashes because she was allowed to keep her heart in a rock (and then, like Lord Voldemort, she manages to return to life a while later from that same rock/horcrux).



Oh... since we're doing Thailand stuff, I got around to making pork satay last week and video-taped the process. It's pretty easy, thanks to Lobo Satay mix. If you can't find it at the local grocery, it's available at Grocerythai or at Importfood.

An Accidental Hike Up Mission Trail Regional Park

Writing about opera and classical music all the time gets to be pretty tiring after a while, so occasionally I lapse onto other odd topics. One of the recent projects was to be an article about the pedestrian bridges of San Diego... Was, because I hadn't realized just how numerous pedestrian bridges are in this city!

When you google 'pedestrian bridge' and 'San Diego' you usually just keep running into a few well written about bridges: the canyon-spanning pedestrian bridges at Quince St, Spruce St, and Vermont Ave in Uptown area. And then there are a couple of recent news articles about the still-not-finished-yet new fancy suspension bridge linking Petco Park to San Diego Convention Center across Harbor Drive in downtown. A very knowledgeable fire-fighter friend of mine pointed me to a few more bridges, and a couple of hours spent on Google Earth poring over freeways and canyons found several more. In fact, I've identified so many pedestrian bridges now that I'm no longer very keen on writing about all of them.... Perhaps just the more interesting ones.

Clockwise from top-left: 1. Vermont St Bridge from Washington Ave; 2. Hollywood Canyon Bridge; 3. Scripps Crossing at UCSD Institute of Geophysics; 4. Harbor Drive Bridge; 5. Omni Hotel Skywalk; 6. Mary Augustine Bridge at Sweetwater Reserve; 7. Quince St Bridge; 8. Spruce St suspension bridge.

But, anyhow, in the midst of my bridge-hunting spree I found one via Google Earth where I didn't quite expect - at the eastern terminus of Clairemont Mesa Boulevard in Tierrasanta area. I thought I knew that road quite well, having kept an apartment right at a corner of that road and I-805 for nearly two years back in the mid 90's, and never knew about it. So when I spotted a 'dry' day in the middle of uncharacteristically rainy October, I hopped on the buses and the trolley up to Tierrasanta to check it out (of course I always check this sort of thing out in person before writing about it! If I retained any lesson from my medical career days, it is that I have absolutely no luck at all when it comes to getting away with bullshitting about stuff I don't know enough about. There are plenty of smarter people who would love to shine light on all the things I should have known about but hadn't taken the trouble to learn... in front of a group of very intellectually intimidating audience).

Tierrasanta is not well served by bus. There is no bus service on weekend, and only hourly ones on weekday. I left my pad in the eastern part of Chula Vista at 4:40AM and made it all the way up to Kearny Mesa Complex by 6AM (I was astounded! Would have expected a 2 hrs transit since I had to catch 2 buses and one train to get there). The first bus into Tierrasanta (holyland in Spanish?) didn't take off until 7AM, though, so I raided the McDonald's nearby for breakfast. It is a very impressive McDonald's... It even has a library area with leather couches and shelves of books and magazines you can read while waiting for your bus! (Thinking further about it, maybe that doesn't reflect quite well on bus service here that the restaurant is practically counting on you having to wait such a long time for your bus that you'd have time to peruse its library. Most of the drivers are really nice and efficient, though. We just don't have enough buses!)

I was hoping for a few good shots of dawn over the wild mountain at the east end of Clairemont Mesa Blvd, but by seven o'clock the sun was already well past dawning... Bus 25 veers south at La Cuenta, so I got off there and walked 1/4 mile or so uphill to the end of the road and was rewarded by a few good morning sun shots like this one:

The bridge spans a canyon separating civilization from Mission Trails Regional Park. I headed across, looked around and just kept on walking... I hadn't been up on this side of Mission Gorge before, so why not explore a bit. 

The main trail was quite wide and well-maintained. I soon spotted a little cut-off trail that heads east toward S. Fortuna Mtn, though. It looked invitingly off-the-beaten-path, so I veered off onto it. Went down a gully, across a little wooden bridge, and up a steep little hill with rough steps marked by logs and sand bags. You know... I'm still just young enough to remember the painfree agile days when I would have had a blast storming up and down these. Nowadays they serve as good reminders of the reason why I need my third leg.

A few forks up the trail with the sun racing up the aging morning and I was up on top of a ledge checking my water supply and having a good look around (while stalling for breath). Something moved in the valley below... I had a look and thought it was one of those cute deers looking to nervously cross the trail in search of greener pasture. That was when the thing broke into a very canine-like jog. It wasn't a hoofer at all, but one of Mission Trails' resident cayotes. I wish he had ran my way to say hello, but cayotes aren't very well-liked in this town (they have a bad habit of having neighborhood pets for lunch, dinner, and even snack).

I took off on a trail toward the Fortuna Saddle (Fortuna is a long mountain with two summits on either end of a saddle)... and then must have taken a wrong turn somewhere (they don't always put direction signs on trail junctions here) as, an hour later I found myself on the 'Rim Trail' instead, heading north parallel to the mountain instead of toward it. Said a few not very holy words since by then much of the sole of my shoes had been de-grooved from climbing up the rough loose-pebbles trail surface. My water is more than half gone and it was getting sunny and hot.... And I hadn't spotted even a hawk! 

But then I remembered that I hadn't set out to hike any mountain at all... I was only going to check out a pedestrian bridge, and that was done a long time ago. And so, having talked myself into not beating myself up over having gotten on a trail to nowhere, I had some fun looking around and taking another round-about trail back. There's some good views to be had on the Rim Trail, too. One of these days I might persuade myself up the mountain again and actually getting to one of the summits...  But for now, here is a slide-show/video summary of the hike, pretty much:

I gather this place would look even more inviting in the spring months when the flowers are blooming... If you like the music, it is the finale from Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier from a 2004 performance at Zurich Opera. Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Zurich Opera Orchestra. Nina Stemme (Die Marschallin), Vesselina Kasarova (Octavian), and Malin Hartelius (Sophie) did the singing. A great DVD of the show is commercially available!

To Music with the San Diego Master Chorale & David Conte

Even religio-phobic me couldn't resist catching a bus out to College Avenue Baptist Church last gray and misty Saturday night to attend the opening concert of the San Diego Master Chorale's 50th season. This all-volunteer troupe of music lovers always give their best and and aren't afraid of filling their concert calendar with music their audience had never heard of before.

Saturday night's two hours long event was well programmed with choral music ranging from the Renaissance master Henry Purcell's (1659-1695) to music of living composers like Paul Halley and David Conte, the latter of whom was present for the world premiere of his choral poem "To Music", a gentle choral serenade with warm and cozy layers of love embedded in vocal interplays and piano accompaniment that is quite refreshing on many levels.

Being an opera fan I, of course, especially loved the inclusion of Samuel Barber's lilting Act II "Under the Willow Tree" from his opera "Vanessa". A few chorale members also turned in convincing bits of solo singing. Especially noteworthy was sweet-voiced soprano Jenny Spence, who hushed the hall in her delightful rendition of Purcell's "Thou Tun'st This World".

The crowd's favorite piece was undoubtedly Georgy Sviridov's playful "Magpie Chatter". I suppose the composer must have had the ill-luck of living near a magpie nest to have come up with this marvelously descriptive chirping banter. It also helped that the SDMC singers are a jolly bunch and made quite a group of enthusiastic magpie in all of its vocal demography. It didn't take much encouragement from the chorus master, Dr. Gary McKercher, for the audience to demand it as an encore to cap off the night.

If you are in San Diego and missed this concert, the SDMC is having another performance of the same program at La Jolla Presbyterian Church on October 24th. Give it a go. It's quite worth the ticket price!

A Gray Trek Along Otay Valley Regional Park

A few miles to the south of where I live is an old river channel called Otay Valley. It used to be a legitimate river; funneling the water down from San Miguel and Jamul Mountains to the San Diego Bay and supporting the bustling grain farming community of Otay Mesa. That was until a dude named Babcott decided to dam(n) the Otay Lakes in 1891. A catastrophe if there was ever one. The dam broke the following January and wiped out the town and its surrounding farms, not to mention the lost of many native plants and animal species that used to live in the river valley.

Nowadays the river bed is mostly dry except for a few ponds that used to be mine pits. It is a protected area now, a joint nature-oriented project by the County of San Diego and the cities of San Diego and Chula Vista. I asked around about it, but none of my native San Diegan friends had visited... They all thought the place dangerous and 'full of illegal immigrants'. I don't know why since many of these friends have no qualms about going hiking down Tijuana River Estuary and Slough considering that Tijuana Slough is right up against the Mexican border while Otay Valley is a few miles further north and well into the United States.

Being a proud survivor (and lover) of the U. City Loop AKA Delmar Loop in St. Louis (my aunt kept warning me off against getting an apartment there while attending St. Louis University because it was a 'bad' area of town. Well, it had gotten much better since she last visited and I loved the place and its eclectic residents and restaurants), I tend not to take second-hand warnings seriously especially when they come from folks who hadn't seen the place first hand. So I printed out this 'trail map' from Otay Valley Regional Park's website last Thursday and caught bus 929 south to have a look.

The nearest bus stop to OVRP is at Beyer Way and Palm Avenue. My main attraction was to be Finney Overlook, somewhere off to the east. It was a very gray and overcast day, though, so I decided to head west first and make for the 'Ranger Station' before doubling back to Finney and hopefully the sky would have cleared enough for a good panoramic view then.

The OVRP website says that there is also a staging area with parking on the Beyer Way trail head. Well, I didn't see one. The trails are quite wide and well maintained, but are also quite devoid of direction posts. It didn't help that there are branches that don't appear on the trail map... And so I got to see the park a bit more thoroughly than I intended, pocketing 2 dead ends (one a fade into nothingness and the other, a rather dangerous cliff-y drop off), and never managed to find Finney Overlook before my turn-around time (I have a life, after all, and can't keep on walking the thing forever!).

Other would be hikers would be glad to know that the staging station with parking lot and working restrooms at Beyer Boulevard does exist, though there were no ranger there to give any guidance when I dropped in. There was an information post, though, with identical information to what you would find online at the OVRP website. I ran into exactly 2 people on the trail. One was cycling away on his mountain bike and the other was walking 2 very cute dogs... No illegal immigrant lurking about as far as I can tell, but there was a family of hawk on a tall tree by Heart Pond about 100 meters west of Beyer Way that took off as soon as I got my camera out (hawks! I swear these guys are the paparazzi's worst nightmares. They can smell a camera from a mile away!).

 They were very clever, mind you. The small and nearest hawk flew right off and did a bunch of tantalizing circles above a hill off to the east, drawing my camera with him so that I didn't spot the really huge hawk (the daddy hawk?) who went off in the opposite direction a second or two later. I turned to try to photograph the daddy hawk, and two more smaller hawks went off in yet another direction, leaving me spinning in place like an ill-coordinated top without catching any of the hawks in action with my slow-acting camera.

Come to think of it... The first and small hawk might actually have been a kestrel. Have a look at him. He's the first two shots in the panel above. The 'daddy hawk' in the third photo, though, is definitely a red tailed hawk.

They picked a good spot to hang out. Heart Pond is quite well reeded. There are only a couple of spots on the trail running the south side of it where you can get to the pond.

Le May Pond further to the east beyond Beyer Way is easier to get to. I intended to take the high trail out east to Finney Overlook and then come back on the pondside trail, but that was when I went dead-ended twice... And I'm actually not bad at trail-reading! They've got more trails than what appeared on the map, and none of them come equipped with sign post!

For what it's worth, the high trail that turned out to be a maintenance road that end at a cliff does afford some good views of the valley... It just so happened that the haze that was hovering over the ground never cleared that day. So the best shot I came up with is the one above.

I did drop by Le May Pond on the way back, though. Really nice and peaceful place with nobody else in sight (though the valley is a narrow one, so you can always see rows of housing at the northern and southern edge of it)... I sat there a while when this favorite bit of I Capuleti e i Montecchi popped into my head and refused to leave.

And here it is... And it has to be Kasarova as Romeo, too. With the voice comes the mood...

So Long, Joan Sutherland (7 Nov 1926 - 11 Oct 2010)

Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, one of the most stupendous operatic coloratura soprano of the last century, passed away at her home near Montreux, Switzerland last night. She was 83 years old.

I confess La Stupenda wasn't one of my favorite singers, but that takes nothing away from her legendary artistic skills and merits. Dame Joan made her dastardly difficult job sound easy (sometimes so easy that she lost the drama-junkies like me in the audience in the process) and was one of the few famous people who actually had a life outside of her art; one that she willingly chose to disappear into after retiring while still very much at the top of her game. It is a great testimony to the fact that one can achieve greatness without being consumed by the vehicle that delivered it. Dame Joan Sutherland is survived by her husband, Richard Bonynge, their son, and grandchildren...

... And by her fans and admirers, of course. Take a time out from the usual dissing of 'the recording industry' today and appreciate the fact that they also make it possible for us who never had the chance to experience artists like Sutherland and others live to still glimpse at their creations via sound and video recordings today.