Regina Glei's Blog, page 6

Bacteria Bacteria

I am writing this in the middle of the covid19 crisis and nobody knows yet where the journey will go with that virus. While people freak out about it I personally have another nasty problem not with a virus but with bacteria. I have sinusitis now for 6 months straight going into month 7. I’ve had problems with sinusitis my entire life, which seems to be in the genes since my mother and sister also had/have the same sinusitis story their whole lives. In the past I got sinusitis two times, sometimes only one time, sometimes three times per year. I cannot remember a single year where I had zero sinusitis. Depending on the severity, it was gone after 2 to 6 weeks.
Last year in August, while on that cruise in Norway I caught another sinusitis. It went along normally and seemed to get better. Then I returned to Japan and after a week or two it got worse again and suddenly for the first time in my life it was stinking inside my nose (very yucky, I don’t recommend it). So I went to the otolaryngologist – since that’s a mouth full, let me use the German word for it, which is HNO derived from Hals = throat, Nase = nose and Ohren = ears doctor. I had seen this HNO before for my “normal” sinusitis” and he gave me the usual antibiotics and slime loosening stuff. It didn’t get better, fever went down but all the rest stayed. He changed the antibiotics. It didn’t get better. I asked him what to do, he shrugged and said I was getting “the strongest” antibiotics already.
Frustrated, I turned to the Internet and started reading stuff about sinusitis (bad idea) and got scared reading articles about fungi in the nose and what not. I went to a new HNO, that was now in October, told him my story and he did an x-ray of my head. Funnily left side was okay (looks dark on the x-ray = air) right side was “white” = stuffed with stuff. New doc ranted about former doc who didn’t even take an x-ray. New doc told me considering that whiteness it’ll take three months or so until I get better. He gave me a different set of antibiotics.
Then started two months of taking some antibiotics, stopping, no improvement, again antibiotics, stopping, no improvement… although at least the stinky stuff stopped.
HNO always gave me the same meds and did basically nothing else. In December I decided to stop going and wanted to test whether the shock of warm weather in Cambodia would help. It didn’t, so in January I went to the third HNO and told him my story. Now this guy had interesting things to say. First of all it’s unusual that I have sinusitis only on the right side. There are two popular reasons for this, it comes from a bad tooth = teeth bacteria leak into the sinuses, or “cancer”. YIKES. Of course I do not like the latter word. But, when the doc said teeth, I almost screamed. In July I suddenly had bad toothache upper right under a 20 year old crown/bridge. I went to my dentist just before leaving for Wacken/Norway. He did not break down the bridge, since I’d be flying the next day or so and gave me antibiotics (only 4 days) and pain killers. The tooth became quiet, was not ideal, but not actively hurting and I let it be.
Because what third HNO said matches with right upper side tooth trouble, I got convinced that it’s that tooth indeed. HNO said, go to the dentist first of all and treat that tooth, then we see what comes next. So this is the stage where I am now, the bridge is broken down and I had four root canal cleaning sessions already. The second was really bad and painful = indicating an infection = bacteria. The third and fourth root canal sessions were less painful = infection is dying down as it seems. HNO is curbing the enthusiasm though saying it will still take two months or so to heal the sinusitis.
He gave me new meds for “widening” the stuck canals in my nose and also, guess what antibiotics. The thing is though that the doses is not so high and I’m supposed to take them regularly for the entire 2 months, not stop and go like from HNO 2. If the tooth action does not improve the nose situation, we have to look at other options, CT scan, exclude the scary cancer option, and maybe an operation to open a “window” in the sinus to drain the goo. HNO 3 seems competent (though I thought that of HNO 2 also in the beginning) but at least he has now a plan with various options that seem valid and there was/is an inflammation at the root of that cursed tooth after all as evidenced by the dentist. I am pissed though that HNO 1 and 2 did not even come upon the idea. While we have of course majorly advanced in terms of medicine to let’s say a hundred years ago, to me the field of medicine is still one great game of guesswork. If it ain’t obvious like a broken bone we basically have not much of a clue.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that HNO3 found the reason = the tooth and that I will be rid of this darn, nasty, bothersome sinusitis by spring! There have been two, three nights already where the right sinus didn’t swell shut completely, I see light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully!

Top Heavy Metal Albums of the Last Decade

The new decade has already started seven weeks ago but it’s not too late to talk about the best heavy metal albums of the past decade.
Such lists popped up here and there on my social media feeds at the end of last year and I felt inspired to create my own personal list

Cambodia Visit – Claimed Back by Nature

On the last main day of travels I hired a car with driver since I had no desire to ride the 57 km to the target temple with a tuktuk. A wise choice, since the drive went quite smoothly with the car. The target was the Beng Mealea temple, which is famous for its moss overgrowth during the rainy season. When I visited there were some remnants of moss left, but most of it had already been burned away by the sun. Nevertheless, the site is breathtaking. The temple is more or less entirely destroyed but how plants rank around it, claiming it back, make for a unique atmosphere which is mystic, bizarre and beautiful. It is well worth the ride from Siem Reap.

On the way back were another three temples to visit, all of them from the 9th century with Bakong temple being the most beautiful as well as best preserved one. The other two, Lolei and Preah Ko resemble the East Mebon and Pre Rup temples of the big circle tour, but Bakong is a gem of its own with its central lone tower. A very impressive site well worth the visit as well.

While all the temple glory makes you wonder who the Khmer were and how they lived and how they built all these sites, the Cambodian people of today have a hard life. Well, the people who actually toiled to built those temples on behest of their kings of course too. I chatted with the lady who brought me my dinner in the Siem Reap hotel every day. She has two sons, six and one year old. She works every single day. People in big companies have one day off per week, but people in small businesses usually work every day, because no work = no money. She has two jobs. She works at the hotel restaurant from 14:00 to 23:00 every day, then, twice a week, she also makes religious flower arrangements for people who go to the temple to pray. On those two days she has to get up at four in the morning.
I asked her about new year. Oh the Cambodian people don’t care. The fireworks and stuff on 31.12. are for the tourists. Khmer New Year is in June. That’s when people go to meet with their extended families to celebrate. The biggest deal is a festival in September though, which lasts two weeks. I understood it’s the Cambodian version of the all saints or Obon in Japan, when you think of your ancestors and honor the dead. There is a lot of fine clothes, fine food and dancing during those times and temple visits.
If you speak English, you can get jobs in the tourist industry, which is the best source of income around Siem Reap of course. Children go to school from 7:00 to 11:00 and then from 13:00 to 17:00. I suppose that’s why she starts to work at 14:00 to cook lunch for her kids. She comes from a small village further north and has never been anywhere else apart from her home town and Siem Reap, she has never been on a plane. Her mother and younger brother came to Siem Reap too. She didn’t speak of a father, maybe he passed away or left for whatever reason and then the family moved to Siem Reap. Her mother is the head chef in a nightclub and she works from 17:00 in the evening to 4:00 in the morning every day. Her mother wanted the son to “get a government job = official” because those are the best jobs, apparently, but he “was too lazy” and does internet commerce to the grievance of his mother. It’s a hard life under the tropical sun. In April it gets over 40 degrees… my hands were covered with heat rash, I got bitten by (only) three mosquitoes and luckily they didn’t carry any diseases. I sprayed an entire 200 ml bottle of insect repellent onto my skin and clothes and got bitten 3 times despite that.
But even though I am usually not in the habit of going to the same place twice, I might return to Siem Reap one day because there are still a lot of temples and sights that I couldn’t see and Angkor Wat and Bayon etc. are so beautiful it’s worthwhile to see them again

Cambodia Visit – Sunrise at Angkor Wat

I am NOT a morning person, never have been, never will be, I suppose, but the first of January of a new decade was approaching and I decided to do the sunrise at Angkor Wat thing after all. Arrangements with the hotel resulted in a departure time of 5:00 in the morning. That meant getting up at 4:30. I tried to go to bed at 22:00 on New Year’s Eve, ignoring the countdown. But… across from my hotel was that already mentioned roof top bar. They blasted (louder than the other nights) live soft pop whining until midnight. I put earplugs in, didn’t help, I put my headphones over the earplugged ears, didn’t help. I played heavy metal. Finally the rest was blended out. At midnight there was a short official fireworks, which I watched a bit from my window. Then techno disco music thumping louder than heavy metal in Wacken let the house vibrate. I dozed on and off until three in the morning when the disco thumping finally stopped. I got maybe an hour of shut-eye until the alarm clock rang. Well it had been New Year’s Eve…
So, there I was at five in the morning riding with the tuktuk. It was pleasantly cool, almost cold, it’s dry season in Cambodia this time of year and that results in a whiff of continental climate with coolish nights of around 22 degrees and hot days with 34. I soon saw the next tuktuk with tourists and the next, all flocking towards Angkor Wat. There was a bit of a traffic jam even at the ticket control site. The stars were still out when I arrived and I headed straight for the lotus pond across from the temple. I was not the first one to arrive there, but not the last either and managed to get into the second row with someone short in front of me. There was already a hue of pink and blue to the east. The people in the first row in front of me were some people talking about finances and stock market exchange…. ahhhhhhh…. excuse me you capitalist fuxxs, don’t you have something else to talk about or can’t you just shut up? Luckily, they did shut up when it became lighter, but nevertheless they were tainting the enjoyment.
Angkor Wat faces west. On the spring equinox the sun rises exactly above the main tower in the middle, now it rose to the right of the complex. Strewn over the whole area surely several thousand people watched the first sunrise of the decade together with me. When the sun was up I ventured into the temple though not the uppermost gallery due to too many people and caught some sights in mild morning sunshine. It was very beautiful, all of it.

The rest of the plan involved the so called “big circle”, but I had requested another stop in Angkor Thom due to the confusion of the day before. I had not seen the terrace of the elephants and the Baphuon temple. At Baphuon I was suddenly more or less alone and enjoyed exploring that temple thoroughly.

On went the journey to the Preah Khan temple, which is huge and also has trees growing out of it. Since it was still before nine in the morning, there were very few people there and I enjoyed that temple immensely, also thanks to jungle birds singing for the new day which made the whole site even more amazing.

Next we went to a temple called Neak Poan or Pean, I found two spellings, which is in the middle of an artificial lake and in itself partially submerged, it’s very beautiful and mysterious site.

Next up was the Ta Som temple, which is small but very beautiful as well and it came along with two temple cats

Cambodia Visit – Angor Wat in Reverse

The ride to Siem Reap with an airline you’ve never heard of went smoothly. Lanmei airlines, apparently a Cambodian carrier, had the smallest distance between seat rows I have ever encountered on any airline anywhere. Interestingly the flight came in from Bangkok and unloaded passengers bound for Phnom Penh, but those bound for Siem Reap stayed on board, then they added those who boarded in Phnom Penh. Luckily, with those super uncomfortable seats, the airbus barely lifted off when it already landed again. At Siem Reap airport are no gangways, you walk over the concrete and some ground personnel tried to separate those who flew domestic from those who flew international to get the latter through customs and border control. Interesting system.

I had to wait a bit for my promised driver and was expecting a car, but then a tuktuk drove me and my suitcase to the hotel. I only walked down the road for a bit and it was the same traffic chaos as in Phnom Penh only with more westerner tourists dodging the traffic. At the hotel I sorted things out for the first day, the so called “small circle” with the three main sites of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Ta Prohm temple.

The goal of the journey was in reach! I boarded a tuktuk and off I went to the Angkor ticket center. The temple complex is about six kilometers north of Siem Reap. On the jungle road just behind ticket control my driver suddenly stopped and said Ta Prohm. Originally the first stop was supposed to be Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm was supposed to be the last, going clockwise. My driver’s English wasn’t the best and it was even harder to communicate with him than with my trusted driver in Phnom Penh. Ta Prohm, um… hm… well, I’m kinda at his mercy. I think he did the reverse tour because on the way to Ta Prohm he stopped at a road shop and had someone put more air into the rear tires. Well, okay, necessary I guess. At Ta Prohm the reverse was no problem, there is only one stop where many people unload from their whatever vehicles. Ta Prohm is amazing, those trees that rank around the temple are very impressive. It looks bizarre. Unfortunately the temple is quite narrow and the loads of people were worst at Ta Prohm.
The trees and their snake-like roots make for an atmosphere I have not yet seen. It’s spooky, beautiful and reminds of the fragility of human endeavor.

Then we went on to Angkor Thom, which is the old Khmer city. The outer wall is left, then jungle has basically taken over and in that jungle are whatever ruins, with the Bayon temple, the temple with the mysterious faces in the center. If we had gone the correct way we would have arrived at Bayon and done the rest later.

But now we arrived from the other side and the driver dumped me and pointed wildly into the jungle and said he will wait at Bayon. All right. I stumbled along and got pretty much lost in the jungle. It was insanely hot, just the peak of the noon heat. I had to ask other tourists for directions. I found Bayon, but of course approached it also from the wrong direction.
The central temple mount is so withered away it looks like a hill at times. The mysterious faces in the many turrets around the main mount are all a bit different and one is more beautiful and mystic than the other. Also Bayon is a rather small site and you are not alone. Looking at my pictures afterwards I am amazed how well I managed to blend out the people.

It was after 13:00 now and even hotter than at noon. I got out of the temple somewhere, having no clue where I was and there was no sign of my tuktuk. I waited in the shade, unwilling to go on walking in the heat and called my hotel, asking them to call him and go looking for me. That worked out in the end and at least I had a bit of a rest in the shade. Then we of course approached Angkor Wat also from the wrong direction. We should have been there at ten in the morning when it’s not so super hot yet, instead we were now at Angkor Wat at 14:00 or so when it was super hot.

Angkor Wat is fantastic. It’s in extremely good shape considering it’s age of over 800 years in the brutal tropical climate. I think everyone knows about the Pyramids in Egypt or Taj Mahal in India. Angkor Wat stands right next to them in size, grandeur and cultural significance, but is somehow still less famous (I think). I guess that’s because of the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rogue regime, which threw the country back into the Stone Age and tourism was only established during the past 20 years.
You can get into the upper half of the temple right under the five towers if you climb up rickety, steep wooden stairs, it’s every bit worth the climb though. It started as a Hindu temple but was partially transformed into a Buddhist temple and has several sites of active worship inside it now too. If Angkor Wat is not yet on your travel bucket list, add it. It’s worth the pain to get there.
The three sites of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom or rather the Bayon temple and Ta Prohm are so different and yet right next to each other. It makes you truly wonder what kind of people built those magnificent temples and in what kind of world they lived.
I’ve been to 36 countries by now but have never seen anything quite like the Angkor area. It’s just “wow”.

Cambodia Visit – Oudong and Zoo

On my third day in Phnom Penh, I escaped the reception desk and waited outside for my trusted tuktuk driver and it worked out. He was there at nine in the morning and I paid him directly and not the hotel. He was happy and promptly drove me north. The goal was the Oudong temple on top of the first hill far and wide outside of Phnom Penh. Later checking revealed it is around 34 km north of Phnom Penh. The road was a rather good highway for most of the way, which meant my driver pushed the tuktuk to its speed limit and dashed down that road with what felt like a 100 km per hour at times. It might have been 80 km, but in an open vehicle without seatbelts it felt horribly fast and I clung on for dear life. But as evidenced by me being able to write this, I survived the journey

Cambodia Visit – Silk Farm

On my second day in Phnom Penh I got the same trusted tuktuk driver but he seemed a bit angry at me! Only when we arrived back in the hotel did I find out why. His English is not that good so it took a while to understand. I had said ten o’clock for today and he went “okay okay”. He seems to have been under the impression that I don’t ask at the hotel desk for the tour but him directly. I didn’t pick up on that the day before. So the second morning I asked the hotel reception again and paid them instead of him. No clue how much margin the hotel takes for giving him the job. But thus I got it that I was supposed to pay him directly and not the hotel.

As for the contents, the tuktuk ride led me to the shores of the mighty Mekong river. The plan was to get onto the Silk Island, its real name is Koh Dach, which is an island inside the Mekong river. The Mekong is a stunning 4350 km long and parts a little for this island, so what you see on the pics is only roughly half of the river.

There are no bridges to Koh Dach and you have to go by ferry, a very old and rickety affair. LOL. The pictures don’t express the age of these vessels or the noise of their sputtering Diesel engines.

Once on the island my driver brought me to a silk farm where a nice guy explained to me (and a group of Italians) about how silk is made. Of course I knew about the worms but not about the entirety of the process. The worms, or rather caterpillars are eating only mulberry leaves for about 30 days, then they turn from white to yellow and cocoon, once they become moths they mate, lay eggs and die. They live for around 45 days in total.

Now, if you want to get silk you have to balance your stock of worms to let some become moths to continue the process and the rest you throw into boiling water and cook them. The traditional process is then to take an eggplant leave and dip it into the hot water picking up threads. About twenty of them you twirl and then spin them into a thread. One cocoon yields up to 500 meters of thread. The outer layer of the cocoon is a bit rougher and used for e.g. rugs. The inner part of the cocoon is softer and spun into a thread for clothes. Then you dye the yellow threads into the desired colors and start weaving. A four meter sarong with a two colored pattern such as this peacock design takes a month to finish, two meter scarves with less of a pattern or none take ten days, they said.

Despite that they sold the scarves for 20 USD and I didn’t even haggle (I don’t like haggling). I’m pretty sure I’d pay double or triple or even more for that in Japan. The guy explaining things to us said he was a “volunteer” and was supporting his university studies with explaining things to tourists and was also improving his (already pretty good) English. The weaving ladies were all widows, he said, who are working at this place as a part of a support program for them. True or not, they make beautiful stuff and it was very interesting to see the process of silk being made the “old” way. I just wonder how the hell our ancestors came upon the idea to boil those cocoons and make threads out of them for cloth. That was quite some invention / discovery.
On the way back to town, I asked my driver to drop me off once more at the national museum, I really like that building and it’s garden and the day before stayed only thirty minutes during the busy day.

That day I stayed for an hour and also borrowed an audio guide and listened to some of the explanations for the artifacts on display. During that audio description, they also said that the museum, which came into existence around 1920 was closed during the four years of the Khmer Rouge rule, I’m surprised they just closed it and didn’t burn it to the ground. Luckily they refrained from doing stuff like that…

Cambodia Visit – Phnom Penh

Cambodia, or rather Angkor Wat has been on my travel bucket list for a while already and I finally decided to go. The Southeast Asian country I’ve been to most often is Thailand (3 times so far). Phnom Penh, my first destination, reminded me a lot of Bangkok in 1999 when I visited there for the first time. There is no public transport system in Phnom Penh except for busses and downtown there are always traffic jams. Last time I was in Bangkok was 2012 and they had an elevated train and had much evolved. In Ho Chi Minh city they were building a subway when I was there in 2016, which should be finished by now? Not sure. In Phnom Penh though it’s all busses, cars, mostly fat pickups, tuktuks and scooters, although less scooters than in Saigon. There is endless chaos in Phnom Penh, though the worst chaos I’ve seen remains the traffic in India.
On my arrival day I took a walk around the block of my hotel and was a bit spooked. There was no real space for walking and no people on bicycles either. So how do I get around town without being able to walk? To hire a tuktuk seemed like a scary prospect, not so much concerning traffic safety but concerning personal safety, what happens if the tuktuk driver takes me somewhere strange and demands more money to take me back and so on and so forth. The possibilities are plenty. I wrecked my brain about those during the night.
The next morning I asked at the reception of the hotel how to get around and the lady immediately suggested, oh we have a tour for 30 USD and you can visit all the major places in one day. Okay, fine, nice, let’s do that. I paid and was then brought to a guess what, a tuktuk. Lol. It turned out to be no problem though, my driver brought me to all the places, nicely waited and brought me back to the hotel

Yogini?

End of 2018 I made a New Year resolution to do something for my fitness. On the 15th of January 2019, I started courses at a yoga studio and behold! I am still at it a year later! That, for me, is an incredible achievement, lol, because I really really am not a sports person. I never saw the appeal of moving your body without need, lol. Because sports is supposed to be good for you and because sports are a major interest of my Dad, I was forced to do sports as a kid. I tried a lot of things. I started with gymnastics, played basketball, went ice skating and I did fencing for a while. So fancy! My poor dad paid for all the fencing equipment/outfit, but alas… I left home, childhood and fencing behind me and at the university I tried another variety of things from horseback riding, over Kendo and Aikido until finally I simply stopped to do anything. None of the stuff could hold my interest. The only thing I did after giving up on sports for quite a number of years was ride my bicycle, but only for a few kilometers each day back forth from the station or to go shopping over the weekend, never for the purpose of “sports bicycling”. For me the bicycle is simply a form of transport that I like with the nice side effect to get me moving and sweating at least a little bit.

But alas, around ten years ago I got a lumbago and from that point on there was a steady decline. Nowadays my lower back is a mess and the upper back isn’t much better thanks to years and years of computer / office work.
So last year I thought, if I don’t do something about the increasing stiffness and pain of my bones and muscles, I’ll end up in ever worse shape and pain in another ten years. But what to do? Yoga is very popular in Japan at the moment and somehow I thought of giving it a try. There is a quite big yoga studio just two minutes next to the office where I work at.
Oh miracle, a year later I am still at it and highly motivated to continue! Progress is very slow, after all it’s only once a week (plus around 15 min almost daily at home before I go to bed, a mix of yoga moves and lower back pain moves prescribed by doctors), to more I could not persuade myself so far, but it’s better than nothing.

There are many forms of yoga. What I’m doing is “hatha yoga”, which is “basic” yoga where you strive to achieve several “ideal” poses/forms/postures = asanas and you stretch and bend and work towards being able to do and hold these postures. It’s relatively sporty and not very spiritual, even if we chant an invocation at the beginning of the class. Also after a year I am still the worst in my class, but there is some progress! I can stretch a bit farther, there is a bit of less pain in the back, there are some shadows of muscles under the fat of the thighs!
I had hoped for a bit of weight loss, but the amount of exercise and the amount of chocolate intake have only balanced out, and I weigh as much as a year ago, but hey, at least it’s not more.

I think I am very lucky, because I found a great teacher. Hana sensei (sensei is the Japanese word for teacher) is very experienced and exerts just the right amount of motivating us and challenging us. I think a good teacher/trainer is a big big factor in any sports. If you don’t like your teacher, the motivation sinks very soon. So thanks to Hana sensei, the miracle has happened that ever since I have been fencing as a teenager, I did any kind of exercise/sports for longer than half a year!
I don’t deserve the title yogini yet, since I am not managing a single one of the ideal postures, but one day, one far day I’ll get there! Thus the New Year resolution for next year and the whole new decade is to continue with the yoga classes and to let my muscles boldly go to where they have never stretched before! And a big thanks to Hana sensei!

You Have Been Assimilated

Last week, I had an eye-opening experience about to just what extent I have been assimilated into the high-context society of Japan