A decent breakfast is generally hard to find in the far provinces. Grilled pork skewers and sticky rice is the de facto breakfast of choice, with rice porridge or soup being available most of the time. If you really want other choices, best to head for a market or nearby university canteen.
We dropped off the kids at their Saturday tutoring session and are having breakfast at Nam’s university. Later, we’ll go check out a Muay Thai gym around the back entrance of the campus since Max wants to start up again.
Busy Saturday.
A three day weekend is something special, but especially so when you’re a little kid. Mommy was off at graduation practice for her uni, so the kids and I got in the Crown and cruised around lazy Sunday style, picked up some fries at Mickey D’s, and went to some shaded outdoor courts across from their school for a picnic and some basketball.
These days, Max is trying out all kinds of sports to see what he likes. He was into football only for a couple years, but has gotten into ping pong more recently. He’s expressed interested interest in starting up muay thai again, so we will start on that at Nam’s uni next week if we can. Just the past couple of days he’s been dribbling around a basketball, so today was the day to find out if he could get the ball up to the basket yet:
A photo of Max in his pre-basket days.Max in his full post-basket glory. Be proud son, not everyone has a snapshot of such an important moment.
This was his very first unassisted basket, and there was much celebration. All in all, he got in three baskets today and wore the hell out of his arms. As I remember, this is an important growth marker for kids – playing until you’re worn out, then playing some more on top of that. So I pushed him some more for good measure.
As we were leaving, some high school girls came around to play in their green team uniforms and we watched them start practicing. Max asked if I could dunk, and I said no, but he should ask the girls if they could.
He asked why, and I told him it might be a good pick up line. He asked what a pick up line was, and when I explained, he got pretty annoyed with me and asked why I wanted him to have such an old (!) girlfriend. I told him it would make all the little girls in his class jealous, after which Max got angry and stopped talking to me for a while. But we listened to trap on the way home, and even Gucci agreed with me.
Japan started a visa exemption program for Thais a few years ago, which successfully created a huge tourism boom. Japan is an ideal destination for Thais that have the money to go on vacation, because although their cultural relevance has been overshadowed by Korea in many sectors here (cosmetics, home electronics, music, tv series, etc.), their image remains strong in others (cars, high end cosmetics, top name electronics, food, manga, etc.), and was much stronger before.
In addition, Japan is perceived as a more friendly and alluring place to visit because of the language (which many Thais can speak a few words of), the food (local versions of which are widely available in Thailand), and the people (who are viewed as a bit stiff, but polite and helpful/friendly). That said, Japanglish is unique and can sound ridiculous, even to the Japanese themselves.
This is a great vid (thx Mark!).
Here’s an alt that will probably be used by my wife’s Japanese section at the uni for a performance at some point in the future, lol:
Nothing to do with Easter, actually. Just some colorful century eggs AKA thousand year old eggs. They usually only come in pink, but it looks like this company’s trying to stand out or something.
When we play catch or practice hitting balls around the vacant lots and parks around here, people stop to watch. Hmm… I’ve never seen anyone else playing baseball in Thailand, either! I’m not a big baseball fan or anything, but it’s great for kids’ hand-eye coordination.
I found the equipment for sale at a secondhand Japanese goods store in town. This was a very popular business until very recently – you could buy containers of household stuff from Japan at various Thai shipping ports for around 70,000 baht and up. A lot of people started used Japanese good shops with stuff from a single container. You couldn’t see what was in the container before you bought it, so there would be some new stores opening with tons of old clothes, others loaded with baby strollers and rice cookers (the wrong voltage for TH), and many with just worthless crap. The best containers were probably the ones loaded with wooden furniture and bicycles. Many of the products were packed in similar moving company boxes, which led to speculation as to where this stuff was coming from.
Last week, we stumbled upon an audiophile’s den at the Kosa hotel that seemed to have been transported straight out of the sixties.
McIntosh tube amps and numerous king portraits.A Garrard Transcription Turntable from the fifties or sixties.Wonder if it works – and what it sounds like.
You mean the Federation can maintain a fleet of starships and explore the deepest reaches of space, but they can’t install a spell checker? Typical bureaucracy.
