19th Street, Yangon.

Burma was grossly intimidating to me when I first thought about coming here. Depictions of an entrapped Aung Sang Suu Kyi, bloggers stuck in the gulag for negative thoughts and an incomprehensible monetary system conspired to make me decidedly worried after I booked my first flight to Yangon in 2012.

What if I ran out of money and was forced to wash dishes in a Mandalay whorehouse to return home? What if I sneezed in a worrisome fashion and was kicked out of the country for life?

As I discovered, these fears were largely unfounded. There are things to be scared of in Burma, but they are largely gaping sidewalk holes and buses. Here is some grossly subjective advice.

Shan noodles.

Clean money – but less so than before.

I was checking out of my hotel on Thursday and wanted to pay for my last two nights in US dollars. I realized that I had exact change — but one of my $20 bills was slightly smudged, the veteran of a turn or two throughout the world financial system. In clear-money obsessed Burma, this could be a real problem.

I desperately tried to hide the offending bill in a stack of other money, and I handed it over to the young and exceptionally clean-cut clerk, who, in typical fashion, carefully analyzed each note before deeming it acceptable. He looked at the $20, and he grimaced. He muttered something under his breath about “marked up.” And to my surprise, he accepted it.

All visitors to Burma are warned over and over to ensure that they get crisp, brand new bills for usage while visiting. This is because Burma’s banks tend to regard any bill that has the slightest mark on it as a fake — an interesting idea, as you’d think fake bills would tend to look newer, but I digress. That is the rule and so it has been, but it seems that with the liberalization of the economy, the Shiny New Bills rule has relaxed somewhat in recent months.

Don’t take this to mean you can merrily rock up in Myanmar with a bunch of manky, 1980s-era money and expect to get by. This merely means that if you’re in a jam, you can probably get away with it for small denominations, if the money is mostly clean and unfolded.

Murderous Traffic

Yangon has some of the most terrifying drivers on the planet, and many of them conveniently happen to be employed as bus drivers — pilots of enormous steel boxes that can wreck mass destruction with the stray flick of a wrist. Crossing the street in Yangon is perhaps the most death-defying such experience in Asia amongst some stiff competition, as newly-minted drivers piloting creaky 20-something cars jostle for space with buses, all at death-defying speeds.

The worst are the buses, which whip around corners with remarkable speed, forcing trapped pedestrians to swiftly calculate which direction the great rear of the vehicle will actually go.

Pedestrians are an utter irrelevance in this grim battle for a foot or two of pavement: you dive out of the way promptly, or you become a pizza-like splotch on the asphalt. I shiver to think of what becomes of the elderly or the disabled in such a street-side environment.

Most of us have come to instinctually expect a driver to slow down a bit if you are both crossing the street and have the right of way: this has not trickled into the Burmese drivers consciousness yet, and as a result, you must be EXCEPTIONALLY careful.

I would like to scare up some statistics on traffic accident deaths in Burma as I suspect they are hair-raising, but I haven’t had any luck yet. I am not sure I want to know. I haven’t seen any buses yet with little stencils of both pedestrians and the slower local dogs painted on the side like a grim WWII fighter jet, but they may well be out there.

Palm reading jeep.

Shifty Money Changers Are Rendered Irrelevant 

When I first arrived in November 2012, the difference between “street” currency exchange and what the banks were offering was considerable. The difference was big enough to make it worthwhile to take a chance on using a street money changer — the type of gentlemen who hang around Maha Bandoola Park in nervous-looking packs, descending upon slow-walking tourists like so many seagulls.

The money changers were mostly on the up and up but not always, and some happened to be quite good at using sleight of hand or other clever tricks to trick you out of some money without you taking notice. (I don’t have proof, but I swear to this day that a money changer near the Sule Pagoda did just that to me — which indicates just how good they are).

But the bank exchange rate and the street exchange rate have now become essentially equivalent, meaning that you can merely go to a government-registered money changer in an air conditioned room to get your kyat changed over, avoiding the risk of foul play. The vague sense of cloak and dagger danger is gone from the affair, sure, but you’ll be considerably less sweaty.

Suspicious goldfish seller.

They Have ATMS Now!

I stumbled bleary-eyed into the Yangon airport one early morning in November 2012, and couldn’t believe my eyes: an ATM had been plonked onto the white marble of the check-in area, where there had not been one a mere week before. I sniffed around it to see if it was real, unbelieving.

Indeed it was: the day I left Yangon was the day the ATM revolution began in the capital city, and by the time of my return in early June, ATMS had popped up everywhere, like so many mushrooms. You can even use one at the Shwedagon Pagoda, in case you find yourself short on offering funds.

The ATMs now accept most cards, although some caveats exist. Sometimes they simply don’t work, for inscrutable reasons known only to bank managers and the technological demons that reside within these occasionally fiendish but convenient boxes: it’s best not to count on them when you’re really in a pinch. It’s also worth notifying your credit card company or bank that you’ll be using the card in such a decidedly unexpected destination as Myanmar, lest they slam a hold on it instantly.

Western Union works in Yangon as well if you’re really in a pinch. However, the fee our black-and-yellow friends charges is exceptionally high, and the outlay is really only worth it for sums near or over $1000. It’s an option that beats slave labor in a Mandalay whorehouse if you’re really in a jam.

Indian food in Burma.

Watch Out For That Hole! No, Really

The biggest danger the average tourist faces in Myanmar, second only to traffic, is holes. I’m talking about the gaping holes in the sidewalk that lurk on nearly every street in Yangon, waiting to drop the absent-minded or merely clumsy into four feet of raw sewage.

Locals have learned to watch where they’re stepping and to occasionally test suspect looking cement panels above the sewage lines, but foreigners tend to lack these instincts. I haven’t seen it in the foreign media yet, but the first story about some hapless French tourist being trapped in the depths of the Rangoon sewage system after misplacing a step or two has got t be imminent. Be especially careful in the dark. You may wish to consider a buddy system if you’ve been drinking.

Addendum: You will see men in muddy or sewage-filled water up to their necks on a regular basis in Yangon, employed to clear out drains when they flood from regular rains. These men deserve considerably more benefits than I think they get, and a spot on “Dirty Jobs.”

Not from this, this was awesome.

Food Poisoning

C’est la vie, my dear.

In all seriousness: Western food is actually your greatest enemy in the war against contracting a devastating case of the trots whilst on vacation in Burma. Hapless tourists think they’re being safe when they order a burger or a pizza, little-knowing that the ingredients for these exotic dishes likely are decidedly elderly, and the chef likely is not exactly experienced with preparing them, either.

Unless you’re at a nicer place in Yangon, stick with the Burmese food, which is much more likely to be freshly prepared —and as with anywhere on the planet, stick with places that are doing a healthy lunch-time business.

Empty restaurants are essentially tempting-looking Venus Flytraps of disease and misery, regardless of if they offer free WiFi or magazines. Come back later and order a Coca-Cola.

If you’re really concerned, you can always live on potato chips, although I would have to question why you’re interested in traveling in the Mysterious East at all if you won’t eat any of the food.

More to come, perhaps, if I think of them.

I’m back in Burma, a somewhat impulsive trip I decided to take when I got an invite to the first ever Internet Freedom Forum for a story — unsurprisingly, more on that later. (It went well).

My first trip to Burma was stressful, largely of the self-generated variety. I was worried about getting the visa, worried about getting enough crisp new bills, worried about finding a place to stay during the madness of November 2012′s tourist season, and generally entirely trepidatious about the place in general.

And indeed, I did come at a bad time. The tourist onslaught of fall in Southeast Asia was coming up against a just-opened up nation with little to nothing in the way of decent infrastructure: finding a hotel room of any caliber at all proved to be remarkably difficult, buses were booked out, flights were booked out, and leaving Yangon at all proved to be rather impossible.

I stayed in Yangon for a week, walking around back-allies with my friend Terry, eating at a lot of tea shops, and avoiding the many deep and slightly terrifying holes cut into the sidewalk. I was charmed, but I was also at the same time mostly bewildered: trying to parse out this curious place, the closeted love-child of Bangladesh and Thailand and Cambodia, trying to put it into some kind of understandable context.

This time around, things seem to have clicked into place. Not that I understand Burma much more, but in that I am not stressed about the procedure, that I am willing to take it in all of its weirdness as it comes. I have decided to (once again) stay in Yangon, and am lacking the pressure to GET OUT OF TOWN SOMEHOW from before: it’s mostly been leisurely walks around downtown and through food vendors, around the marbled-paved round of the Shwedagon for the fifth time, around the parks and by the  crumbling, gorgeous colonial buildings.

Myanmar Beer on 19th Street and food vendors in the alleyways, bookstores and the luxury malls that are popping up like shiny mushrooms on most corners of downtown: I’m trying to get a sense of the rythm of the place, what makes it shamble along, in which directions it is going. (It has been raining a lot. I keep trying to find a time when the weather will justify a photo expedition).

I was the other night at one of the massive new malls on the outskirts of Yangon, which featured gelato shops, the latest Korean fashions, and a multiplex: it reiterated to me that the outside percpetion of the world of Yangon — a land still full of secret police and Orwellian intruige and picturesque backwardness — has been wrong for a long time, grows more inaccurate as each day goes by.

We do not know how Yangon will develop, but we hope for the best. There’s darkness in the air, but even my in-borne cynicism is muted slightly by the hopefulness that permeates Yangon in this particular month, this particular year. Maybe, if my luck plays out, I’ll get to live here sometime soon and see for myself.

Gunung Agung on Bali.

Learning to dive is deceptively easy, which is apparently a problem in some respects. Oodles of divers put through their paces in blocks of eight in a swimming pool and in a calm sea are awarded their dive certifications in a matter of three days.

They are often then convinced they can drop into current and shark-infested waters and badass their way out of the situation, giving custom to decompression chambers and rescue divers everywhere. This was not the route I wanted to go.

I earned my SSI Open Water certification in three days, which was indeed pretty painless. The scuba gear becomes more sophisticated every year and is now easily operationalby a mentally average 11-year-old.

The most important part is learning how to breathe, an instinct that can be hard to override for many people when below the water, where we’re conditioned to hold our breaths until we can come up for air. Most scuba instructors willrecite KEEP BREATHING like a sort of dark incantation.

The main trick to learn, in my estimation, is buoyancy control, which is a nice way of saying “floating in one place without bouncing off the bottom and accompanying pointy stinging coral every five minutes.” This can be achieved with a combination of proper weighting, breathing in and out when needed, and a lot of practice, especially swimming around in circles with fins.

If you want to snap a picture of a shy garden eel or a paranoiac mantis shrimp, this is especially important: understandably, the flightier creatures don’t take kindly to being suddenly fallen upon by an alien creature wearing Lycra.

I did the “open water” bit of my Open Water and Advanced SSI courses at Tulamben, a famous dive site in Bali where the wreck of the US transport ship USAT Liberty lies in relatively shallow water off the rocky black-stone beach.

The Tulamben wreck. Atmospheric.

It’s one of the most shallow and thus easy to dive wrecks on the planet: the ship was initially stranded on the beach in 1942 after it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, and then was washed into the ocean by the 1963 eruption of the Gunung Agun volcano.

Now, the area surrounding the Tulamben wreck is the epicenter of diving in Bali, and also happens to be a remarkable source of underwater Indonesian biodiversity. It’s also a gorgeous place: divers walk into electric blue water off a beach covered in black and reddish pebbles, dotted with swaying coconut palm trees. Sure, the pebbles are large and unpleasant to walk on in those obnoxiously thin scuba diving boots, but nothing pleasurable comes unaccompanied with pain — or that’s what I regularly tell myself.

I made a good choice learning to dive here, I’ve been reassured by my diving friends and by the scuba instructors — and all bias aside, they’re absolutely right.

I could have learned to dive in a silty and freezing California lake, or in an equally silty Louisiana bayou, but instead I timed it so I could dive in the heart of Indonesia’s coral triangle, spotting mantis shrimp, lion fish, and nudibranchi on my first-ever Open Water dive.

Throughout the three days I stayed at the Scuba Sereya resort at Tulamben, finishing off my certification, I spotted creatures many divers wait years to get up close and personal with, including both a red and a lavender Rhinopias scorpion fish with stern expressions and skin flecked with camouflaging tendrils, a juvenile lion fish (bright white and decidedly spiny), an emotionally distressed oriental flying gunard with psychedelic “wings,” three species of garden eels in one spot, and much, much more.

I also became personally acquainted with the strange obsession that are nudibranchi for many divers. Such a passionate international following for what amounts to an unusually colorful slug might sound curious to non-divers, but then you’re in the tropics, spot your first curious invertebrate jewel gliding along the bottom, and are seized with a sudden notion: “Hey, that’s really cool. I wonder if I can find another?”

And then suddenly you too are possessed with this curious passion to spot weird-colored species of slugs in rocky outcrops, and photograph them, and share pictures with your friends, and maybe even spend thousands of dollars to attend lectures on them (as many people do).

Nudibranch seeking is the Easter egg hunt of the tropical Pacific, or an obsession for the kind of people who might regularly collect baseball cards: best of all, they certainly don’t move very quickly. They are occasionally adorably referred to as “nudis.” I am certain someone is producing the t-shirt.

mantis shrimp

Scuba Sereya had a book helpfully titled “Nudibranch Behavior” set out in the dining area. It was short. Because, when you get right down to it, handsome little creatures that they are, they are still simple-minded slugs, with relatively simple desires. I did not finish the book but never got to the part where it’s revealed that they hunt in packs and make rudimentary tools.

Do I have any advice for those hoping to learn to dive?

Learn to dive somewhere warm full of remarkable tropical fish, that will beguilingly entice you into taking up yet another fabulously expensive hobby — one that gives you multiple excuses to visit tropical paradises, on the bright side. You can also learn to dive in: a giant Belgium swimming pool, a Midwestern missile silo, or a silty lake possibly occupied by the Loch Ness Monster, but I think this would be a considerably poorer choice. 

Moray eel eating a fish. So cool. This was taken by my instructor, Angga, during a night dive.

Learn to dive at a place where you can get individualized attention. I was lucky enough to be the only student Jaka, my excellent instructor, had for my Open Water course, and I was also the only student during my Advanced Open Water course. This can be a matter of luck or expense, depending on your situation, but I think getting individualized advice and supervision during the early days is important. Scuba diving is relatively safe but can kill you if done improperly: you really want to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Borrow or buy a dive computer. Dive computers do all those pesky dive table calculations for you, and although you’re not required to have one during a guided dive, it’s important for you to be able to calculate how long you’ve been underwater and your decompression stop time in case you get in a jam. Figuring out how to use one early in the game will serve you well.

Do a night dive. Sure, it might be harder for the claustrophobic, but a night scuba dive is one of the most awarding (and surrealist) experiences I’ve ever had: floating through warmish gloom, illuminating a strange new cast of characters with a flashlight. It’s nothing if not alien. Tiny feather stars swoop into holes, nocturnal nudibranchi hover about, and the local mantis shrimp and eel population goes into hunting mode (see figure above).

I was under the impression that scuba diving required mathematical skills. I have always had certain issues with mental mathematics (as diagnosed by highly-paid professionals) and whenever I contemplated taking up scuba diving, visions of me desperately counting backwards on my fingers while 100 feet deep in the wine-dark sea danced into my head.

I imagined sinking backwards into the gloam of the watery black because I hadn’t bothered to get a pocket calculator, doomed to hypothermia and devourment by angler fish with big blinky eyes. Compounded with this was the simple reality that I could not be trusted to follow directions as simple “Don’t walk into that active volcano” on family trips, meaning that the odds of my parents allowing me to take up scuba diving at age 15 or so were roughly nil.

These reasons conspired to keep me away from learning to dive until I was in my 20s — when I realized that dive computers did all the math for you, and that sometime in the ensuing decade plus, I’d figured out how to follow basic directions for at least five seconds a time.

But things weren’t right: I was entirely too busy riding bikes around New Orleans and studying while at Tulane, and the Cambodia dive operators occasionally lost people, and the Thailand dive operators often featured 8 people to a certification course in locations best described as Island of the Bros. I kept putting it off. I’d Do It Eventually.

Then, I decided to do a “Discover Diving” course while visiting Komodo in April, which allows you to go on a guided dive without undergoing full certification. As is usually the case when ones descends into the psychedelic, endlessly fascinating world of the Komodo deep, I was smitten, finding crocodile-fish and shoals of glittering squid and irate clownfish without even having to try for it, transported into some sort of weird real-life simulcran of a Richard Attenborough special. I have always regarded Attenborough as something of a demigod: perhaps this was akin to attending church.

I liked the divers, too: I’d finally found a sport that combined both acute nerdiness, outdoors activity, and weird zoology into a single glorious package, and everyone seemed to celebrate a successful dive trip with beer. Enviable goals and enviable people, decked out in wet-suits with awesome tans, talking in this laconic bad-ass fashion about hanging out with manta rays and flitting through the crevices of abandoned wrecks. How could I not want to be like them?

It was decided: I was in Indonesia, the water was warm enough for my hilariously acute cold sensitivity, and I even had something approximating disposable income for the first time in recent memory. It was, decidedly, now or never.

My friend Robert, who I’ve been staying with in Bali, is an accomplished diver and underwater photographer, who has taken photographs of manta ray hordes, irate looking frog-fish, and the multifarious wonders of the Papuan deep. Looking at such photos is the best sales pitch one can imagine for diving.

He suggested that I take up with Bali International Diving Professionals or BIDP, a dive outfit located in Sanur that has an excellent reputation in the region — and located a convenient corner away from his villa in Sanur.

More to come. Gripping, I know. (I did take these pictures with a camera borrowed from my dive instructor!)

The 8 Stages of Genocide Against Burma’s Rohingya

Rohingya Muslim’s in Burma’s Rakhine state have now been ordered to adhere to a years-old two child policy by the government, in what authorities claim is an effort to defang ongoing tension between the Buddhist and Muslim communities.  In reality, this is ethnic cleansing. And it is ongoing in Burma today.

Restricting the reproduction of a less-than-loved ethnic group is a tactic that’s been trotted out repeatedly through generations of ethnic cleansing and genocide: a bad sign that’s all the more ominous in the face of increasing strife between Rohingya Muslim’s and the overwhelmingly Buddhist population of Burma.

Human Rights Watch unambiguously identifies the Burmese government as complicit in the abuses against Rohingya, calling it a government-backed “campaign of ethnic cleansing.”  Even national icon Aung Sang Suu Kyi has denounced the two-child policy as of May 27th, stating that “They shouldn’t discriminate. This is against human rights” — one of her first statements in defense of the Rohingya, whom she has been largely silent on during the past year.

Read more at UN Dispatch….

This was totally me.

I have lately been obsessed with the rather murky concept of self-defense, a side-effect of living for quite a while in multiple cities where a statistically not-insignificant number of people are interested in robbing you.

I have lived in Washington DC and New Orleans, two of the more notoriously crime-ridden US cities, and then of course most recently in Phnom Penh, Land of Smiles And Also Purse-Snatching. In recent months, I’ve had my phone stolen from me in tricky snatch and grab incidents more time than I care to relate (though never, I should admit, in an even vaguely threatening manner).

It wasn’t just me: seemed like every week that one of my friends in Phnom Penh would come forth with a new and increasingly grim mugging story, showing off scars or sadly lamenting their brand-new laptop, cellphone, or handbag. Soon after I witnessed a violent attempted-mugging than retaliatory beatdown on a busy Phnom Penh street a month and a half ago, I realized that I’d become distinctly jumpy.

I’ve never been a paranoid type, but suddenly, all the signs were there: locking doors behind me obsessively, peeping out from behind curtains whenever I heard a funny sound, carrying my switchblade with me at all times just to make myself feel better. A strange lizardy part of my brain suddenly understood those conservative wing nuts who wish to be allowed unfettered access to automatic weaponry: well, of course you’d want a personal Uzi! They’re coming for you, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

I needed to do something to make myself feel better. And since getting a Uzi might be possible in Phnom Penh but isn’t exactly suggested, I was happy to enroll in a recent self defense seminar at the newly minted Phnom Penh community college.

Why self defense?

I figured my berserker rage technique of defending myself, while making guttural and horrid canine noises, is probably reasonably effective but perhaps could use a little bit of delicacy and refining.

Self defense courses are a weird beast. Thanks to a common compulsion, you find yourself amidst a bunch of friendly and socially normal people standing around a classroom blinking at each other, about to engage in acts of the most heinous of simulated violence. There’s a lot of awkward giggling.

It was pretty much like this.

Mild-mannered types especially seemed to be attracted to this Phnom Penh session, perhaps sensibly aware they could use some advice on the age-old topic of Avoiding Getting Your Ass Kicked. One woman was a schoolteacher who needed to know how to break up the occasional schoolyard fight, another a very gentle-appearing former schoolteacher who’d soon be opening his first Phnom Penh bar.

Me, I was worried that the course would conjure up some strange interior bits of my soul, where all that paranoia and fear and latent aggression churn together into a dark and rather distasteful soup. I rarely get this existential with day long adult learning workshops.

The instructor was an expatriate who does jiujitsu and wished to try out the self-defense teaching thing. He was fit and was named Lance – as would be expected — but thankfully didn’t bring that sort of swaggery kung fu attitude to the table that I’ve witnessed in some similar contexts. For this I was grateful. The class began.

First we simulated a mugging, in an exercise where one person was sent out of the room with a handbag, and a random member of the class would be selected to hold a wooden knife and “mug” the victim.

Most people, quite rationally, approached the “mugging” as a mere simulation and delicately thrust the wooden simulated knife in the general direction of the victim, with a few apologies. This was supposed to teach you how to respond when something surprising and aggressive is directed at you.

All robberies in Asia look just like this.

I mostly learned from this experience that I should consider taking up mugging as a secondary career, mainly because I was surprisingly good at it, stalking around somebody’s back then directing a frightening slash right up against the eyeballs. I’ll admit that I rather enjoyed being a simulated mugger — finally experiencing some hint of what it was like to not be the gazelle-like urban prey but the urban predator, stalking and waiting and taking.

Suddenly no one wanted to be my partner. I realized I should not grin when pretending to mug somebody. I had looked into the dark recesses of my psyche all right, but the answer was a bit unexpected.

We simulated a number of other attacks, and soon discovered a flaw of a group class like this: most people are terrible at simulating aggression and rage.

Socialization and a functioning society demand that people get along and not derive pleasure from violently kicking the shit out of each other, or even pretending to — a pressure that’s especially strong on women and girls.

This is all understandable, but it also meant I never felt particularly intimidated when a sweet schoolteacher was delicately pretending to choke me out while apologizing profusely about it. One woman suggested “Imagine she’s stealing your boyfriend!” to get past the mental block. I found it hard to imagine people of such staggering niceness even doing that. Maybe accidentally cutting in front of me at the supermarket, or accidentally stepping on a ladybug.

No, the class needed a few trained martial artist types (male and female!) to actually shake us up a bit, or perhaps someone with a face and attitude that demanded a good roughing up. Simply put, the trainee sharks were lacking chum. 

I really want one of these, but they don’t travel well.

Thankfully, my friend Mary and I are both little lady heathens and were perfectly capable of roughing each other up — although as amusing as simulated-mugging and assault of a good friend IS, perhaps not the most realistic of scenarios. She’s probably unlikely to steal my liquor or my car in the near future.

Truth is, when it comes to primal rage, I never really needed lessons. I sometimes just lie in bed staring at the ceiling and being insufferably angry for no particularly reason: although I’m usually able to be a pleasant sort of individual in modern society, I tend to turn into a small blonde incarnation of Satan when confronted with airport delays and annoying bureaucratic types wearing glasses who don’t want to let me do something.

The majority of any reasonable self defense course is actually defensive tactics: basically, one wants to do your damnedest to avoid a scenario where you’re going to have to fight, which can mean anything from avoiding strolling down dark alleys to 2:00 AM to (borrowing a scenario Lance trotted out), avoiding entering into committed relationships with world champion kick boxers who really like to drink and do meth.

Downtown Phnom Penh’s mean streets. Well, sorta mean.

The course also got into the more interesting aspects of the Cambodian aggressive psyche, largely the fascinating phenomena that is Khmer crowd mentality.

If you’ve spent much time in Cambodia, you’re likely aware of this curious cultural quirk: if you’re robbed from in a public area, one needs only to shout JAO (thief) really loudly a few times — and watch the locals suddenly emerge into the daylight with less-than-gentle intentions.

Then, there’s the classic Over Confident White Boy trap: assuming that since you’re a big six foot tall guy from England who took karate in middle school that you can totally take that wiry little Khmer motodop who’s getting in your face about 2000 riel.

This is an unfortunate logical fallacy, as many white boys have discovered to their own detriment that if you take a swing at one Khmer motodop, you have suddenly angered multiple motodops, many of whom were probably waiting all week for some idiot to try something. Your odds in this scenario of getting knifed, or at least curb-stomped a bit, are rather painfully high. Don’t do this.  

We learned how to escape from a headlock and avoid having a beefy forearm get up under your chin, cutting off your windpipe. We practiced escaping when someone has your arms pinned behind your back, and how to use the force of someone tugging away at your handbag or smartphone against them.

We also learned how to throw someone off you who is attempting to rape you using merely the surprising power of your thighs, which was an incredibly awkward classroom exercise but was a rather cool jiujitsu technique.

Don’t think the look suits me.

No, a self-defense course will not turn you into a super warrior, and you should really distrust any ostensible instructor who claims he or she can render you a Rambo in the course of three hours. The point of this is different: confidence building, awareness.

“I don’t actually think this class will make me able to defend myself,” observed my friend Mary as we walked back from the course. “But it’s definitely made me feel more confident.”

That’s really the point: not creating super warriors, but giving people a sense that they actually can do something against aggression and violence that doesn’t involve curling up into a ball on the floor. That’s why you should take a self defense class.

As is usually the case when I travel, I ate some things in Jakarta.

I regret not taking photographs of the kamping satay and the utterly bizarre but curiously awesome garlic bread, chocolate, and cheese satay the friendly owner pushed on me later in the evening. Nor did I photograph the rather tasty sushi rolls I consumed at one of Jakarta’s multifarious Hip Little Japanese restaurants (blooming like mushrooms after a hard rain), or a Bento box, or even the aggressively cool coffee shop with tasty Sulawesi brews and a menu made out of a very well-chosen typeface.

Moving on. We all have our regrets in life.

This is a hefty portion of Mie Aceh, a spicy noodle dish hailing from the northernmost tip of Sumatra. My former colleague Christi suggested I check this Mee Aceh joint out in the Benhil district of Jakarta, and I’m glad I did.

One of the spiciest dishes I’ve tried in Indonesia, these beef noodles have a potent chili kick and are offset with pickled shallot, cucumber, and the omnipresent emping crackers  — I would have liked some lime. It’s filling, oily, and unsubtle: I can see this being an excellent and odiferous hangover addiction.

There’s two kinds of Mie Aceh by the by: Mie Aceh Goreng (fried and dry, like the dish above) and Mie Aceh Kuah, which is a spicy curry soup. I want to try the second variety next time.

Try it here: Meutia Rumah Makan – Jl. Bendungan Hilir Raya No. 60, Jakarta.

The Natrabu chain of restaurants specializes in Minang style food, hailing from the highlands of western Sumatra and typically served in a curious sort of personal buffet: you sit down and waiters bring small plates of around 8 to 15 different specialities, all served in a dining room that’s an amusing hybrid of golden and red Minang finery and the latest in early 1970s decor.

You pay only for what you eat, which is eyeballed by waitstaff after you finish. It’s a cunning ploy, as it’s hard to resist nibbling at something tasty that’s been placed directly in front of your nose. Thankfully, the food is quite good and covers a wide gamut of the usual good, spicy, oily Minang eats: beef rendang, squid cooked in coconut milk, tiny fried fish with sambal, a surprisingly tasty slab of fried beef jerky with sambal, chicken with chili and soy sauce and water spinach cooked in coconut milk, among other stalwarts.

This spicy, gloriously unrefined joyride of a cuisine will never in any rational universe be mistaken for health food, but a meal at this chain — which has been plugging along since 1967 — is a rather amusing look at Jakarta Business Lunch Culture, as people hobnob and devour copious amounts of beef over warm glasses of tea, the local stand-in for a 12:00 noon martini.

The staff seemed rather excited to have an American in the house (at the branch nearish the National Museum), and as I ate, I was presented with a small American flag on a bamboo tray for my table. This was, I feel I don’t need to add, absolutely charming. They also were quite eager to pose for a mugshot or two.

Yes, this is real.

The food selection actually looks good — heavy on the burgers — and they have some sort of mysterious drinking game neither myself or my friend could figure out on the back on the menu.

Maybe they think this is still a thing in America, and cool people like Justin Bieber and Barack Obama are wandering about saying it all the time, sometimes quietly to themselves when no one is around them, even. Because YOLO is that cool.

 Someone maybe should tell them.