Author: Justin

Climbing Motorcycle Show @ Red Cross Fair

What is the Red Cross Fair?
Every year in February, for Chinese New Years, the downtown area of Mahasarakham (Maha Sarakham) around the clock tower is swarmed by vendors and street sellers of every kind of unsanitary food and useless street fair item imaginable. Entire avenues are blocked off for a few weeks, both officially, with rolling steel roadblocks, and unofficially, with sheer human mass. This is the Northeast Thai version of Carnival, sans dancing or fucking in the street, since that would take entirely too much energy (this is the tropics, after all). Somewhere at the center of activity is the real fairground area complete with rickety-ass fair rides of death, rigged game booths, sideshows with brightly illustrated signs ten times more interesting than what’s inside, and even more of the same unsanitary food stalls and useless crap-sellers. In a word, heaven. But to be a bit more honest, it’s just like a fair back home after all is said and done. Except for the motorcycle show.
I saw the “climbing motorcycle show” last year and regretted not having a video camera at the time. The rider was the craziest guy I’ve ever seen, pulling stunts I’d never even imagined. I won’t even try to describe them. Suffice to say, they were some of the most amazing riding tricks I’ve ever seen – in person, on TV, on the net, EVER.
When the Red Cross fair rolled around this year, I knew I had to get it on film. Unfortunately, it seems that they’ve cleaned the show up a bit; it didn’t have the same impact it had last year, and the rider was different this year. It’s of course possible that it was just his day off, but I prefer to believe that he died in a blaze of glory, trying to pull an inverted somersault while doing his stuff.
They’ve added a car to the show (a Nissan NV) this year and have given the children active roles in it. This is pure hubris, and one can only hope the gods turn a blind eye. Anyhow, without further ado:

2nd Anniversary Dinner (at home)

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From 12 o’ clock, clockwise:

  • Samoo – A special delicacy of ground pork and a whole bunch of special herbs, from the Ubon area. Nam’s mom made a pot of it for us a few days ago, and she’s the only person we know who can make it.
  • Sukiyaki-sliced beef we found at the local Tesco. I fried it in butter/sesame oil with garlic and sprinkled with coarse ground salt, pepper, and kaffir lime.
  • Deep fried tabtim (hybrid tilapia, pink/orange in color). They fry these (and any other fish) up for you at Tesco.
  • Tom Ka Gai, spicy/sour chicken soup with coconut milk
  • Thai version of a mixed salad with local tubers, pumpkin, and fresh tomatoes

(Thanks to everyone who wrote congratulations – we miss you all!)

Promenade

Earth, sky, sea, and rain
Is she coming back again?
Men of straw sneak a whore
Words that build or destroy
Dirt, dry, bone, sand, and stone
Barbed-wire fence cut me down
I’d like to be around
In a spiral staircase
To the higher ground
And I, like a firework, explode
Roman candle lightning lights up the sky
In the cracked streets trampled under foot
Sidestep…sidewalk
I see you stare…into space
Have I got closer now?
Behind the face
Oh…tell me…
Charity dance with me
Turn me around tonight
Up though a spiral staircase
To the higher ground
Slide show, sea side town
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Above is a partial view from the front of our new house. The view was a major reason why I wanted to build a house here in the first place. If you look closely, you can see the top of my university’s administration building (it’s a kilo or two away in a straight line, unfortunately, there is no road running straight there):
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Since you can see that building from my house, the reverse is also true, of course, and when this house was being built, I used to take my camera and a zoom lens up to the roof in between or after the Master’s classes I taught there. I would take photos of the workers dumping trash in the pond or peeing in my backyard and go confront the foreman with it later, saving the photographic evidence for when he swore in front of the developers that nobody would dare do such things (yeah, I’m pretty much the client from hell).
That roof was also my bug-out area when I needed a smoke or wanted somewhere to relax for a few minutes. The door to the roof was always open and it was often the coolest part of the building with constant breezes, even on the hottest days. You could look over the waist-high wall surrounding the perimeter of the roof onto the parking lot, which was green with all the old trees that make my university so nice to walk around, and the people and cars looked like miniature toys scattered across the floor… The nicest part about going up to the roof was that you were pretty much guaranteed your privacy. I went up there at least a couple times a week for six months, and saw maybe four other people in that time.
It’s funny what kind of thoughts go through your head when you’re looking at people you may or may not know from 16 stories up. I know what I always think of. But there’s a big difference between wondering what it would be like and actually stepping off…
Yesterday, one of our seniors jumped off the roof of the administration building and died. What this boy was thinking, I have no idea. The chances are, I don’t even know who he is.
But it still makes me sad thinking about it.