Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
Kubota convertible with sunshade driving around town every day with no plates and hazards flashing.
As a side note, I know this gent and he’s more of a classic than all of the twenty-odd cars in his collection… He collects all of the cars that he wanted in his youth, but couldn’t afford. Never knew he wanted a rice tractor, tho.
It’s one in the morning and we all just got back from seeing Star Wars, in English, three minutes from our house in Sarakham. That was pretty special. Overall, I liked it, and Max did, too. It was a little bit loud and scary for Mina (she’s only six).
A couple of notes:
True Manhood is playing to win.
True Manhood is making the shot.
True Manhood is making them remember your name.
True Manhood Quadruple Barrel Triple Malt Scotch* Whisky. For the True Manhood in you.
……………………………………
*Proudly made to stringent Scottish standards in the old country (Vientiane, Laos). Available at the Grapevine.
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This is a huge Windows-driven LCD with which I gauge my arrival to the university every morning. It’s usually not on when I roll by the first time since I have a lot of early morning classes, but on free days I sometimes see diagnostic screens, Windows startup, and the plethora of error dialogs that the operator has to click through before getting to the day’s scheduled programming. Sometimes I dream of hijacking it for giggles.
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If you’re a Sarakham native, you know where you can get this for 19 baht ($0.54 US, not including beer or sticky rice). And if you are not, I’ll take you.
In the land of Loe, Chnag, and Sanghi.
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It was an 8-day Thai funeral.
Cremation (and for Max and I, ordination) was on the last day.
Ashes were spread on the nearby Chi river this morning (9th day).
Nam is still working on the aftermath, even now. These are some photos from one of the outfits (HD-ELEE Studio) covering it.
During the Songkran water festival, a fire truck came around to refill its tanks at the pond in front of our house. The trucks normally spend the duration of the festivities driving along the main strips downtown and basically enjoying being the kings of the country-wide watertfight. On this day, however, a huge fire broke out within a mile of our house and this truck was not at all ready to do its job… The next day we saw another fire truck spraying people during the waterfights, so obviously, Songkran is the worst time of year to have a fire in Thailand.
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Breakfast places are few and far between in Sarakham, but this place is ok sometimes.
(these were among Taro’s GoPro photos from last month)
AKA Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, Thailand’s Princess Royal, came to our university to open my faculty’s new building today (Official title: The Local Knowledge Learning Center). Pretty much every Thai staff member/teacher wears an official white uniform to these ceremonies, so it was fun being the only person in a black pinstriped suit (those not wearing dress whites wore white or black suits, but nobody else had pinstripes – I’m so happy I had this one made all those years ago because it’s BOSS). There was much discussion leading up to today’s event about where the best place to enter the campus and park would be, with some teachers coming in hours before the ceremony started, but I snuck in through an unguarded back gate on my scooter and talked my way past three roadblocks five minutes before assembly time. Then I sweated through the next three hours, happy I had an undershirt and a folding fan. It was glorious.