Watching the Nam Chi

Thailand has been suffering from record flooding in recent weeks. What sets this situation apart from years past is that previously safe areas have also been flooded out. Rainfall has been heavy in some areas, but what seems to have caused the problems this time is the steady meddling with waterways and ignoring what might happen when they overflow.

Maha Sarakham is said to be at risk from today until October 31st.

I think the area where our house is should be okay, but of course there is also the possibility of the roads being wiped out, so I went aggro at Big C last week and stocked up on loads of boxed milk for Max and diapers for both of them. Also, the Nam (river) Chi flows in a long curve along the back of the Big C parking lot before running parallel to the highway to Kalasin, so it’s a good place to see the water level.

I hope I never have to use the rubber raft I brought over from Japan.

max’s wittle bitty (part 2)

Getting rid of Bitty turned out to be a mistake. Max demanded to know where his pet had gone. Upon learning that Bitty had been returned to the pond (“to be with his friends…”), he threw an epic fit. It was so incredibly heart-rending and long, we all piled in the car. Destination: Pet store.

The main pet store in Maha Sarakham is five minutes from our house, but it seemed like ages with Max screaming the whole way. The last time I’d been there was a few years before, to buy charcoal for my DIY air/water purification project (mission status: Incomplete). I had been horrified to see the neglect of the fishtanks on display; a couple of them were filled with the black, rotting corpses of goldfish bobbing violently as the pumps merrily bubbled away. This time, there were no such horrors. We bought Max the smallest possible tank (ten inches by six?) with gravel and a pump, and decided on two attractively striped little bitties. We didn’t know it at the time, but this tank contained an anomalous zone with Strange Occurrences.

The best way to describe the Occurrences is with a timeline of the less than one-month span the aquarium was actually in operation, plus the follow-up period:

  • Day 1: The attractively striped bitties spend a happy night together.
  • Day 2: Daddy finds a small freshwater crab outside in the yard (they crawl over from the pond across the street, or up from the drainage pipes), and puts it in the tank.
  • Day 3: One of the bitties disappears; there is zero trace of him.
  • Day 8: The crab molts, and for a day, it looks like there are two crabs (Nam is convinced that daddy put another, immobile crab in the aquarium).
  • Day 9: The molted shell disappears, apparently eaten by the crab to stave off osteoporosis.
  • Day 20: Nanny finds a HUGE male crab with a claw the size of the entire smaller crab; we put it in the tank.
  • Day 23: Somebody puts red sticky rice in the aquarium and the water turns soupy pink. The crabs grow pink fuzz on their shells.
  • Day 26: The remaining bitty disappears, also with zero clues left as to what actually happened.
  • Day 27: Since Max lost interest in the aquarium and there are no actual bitties left, daddy makes the executive decision to let the crabs go and save the electricity used to keep the pump running.
  • Day 28: The aquarium, emptied of water and left outside, suddenly cracks as if in protest.
  • Day 35: The nanny’s hand is cut as she tries to move the broken aquarium.
  • Day 40: The aquarium disappears without a trace.

So the main mystery is: What happened to the fish? The simple explanation is that the crabs ate them. However, although this is perhaps a reasonable explanation for the second fish, the first fish was nearly as big as the small crab (the big crab wasn’t yet in the tank when the first fish disappeared). And there are other questions/factors as well:

  • Do these types of crabs eat live fish? They didn’t seem to like meat as far as I could tell.
  • The crabs did like goldfish pellets and were fed twice daily
  • Even if the crabs did catch the fish, it seems unlikely they could have eaten them entirely, leaving no trace at all
  • Daddy did look to see what was happening in the tank at least twice a day, during feeding time

The other major possibility is that the fish jumped out of the tank, but I never found them. The area around the table the tank was kept on was cluttered with baby seats and toys and whatnot, but I looked around everywhere more than once and still didn’t find anything.

Not having a satisfactory answer and not knowing eventually led me to consider alternative explanations:

  • Wormhole (did they warp away?)
  • Evolution (did they walk away?)
  • Outside predation (did an errant albatross enter my house unnoticed?)
  • Astral Travel (did they have an out of body experience so good they decided to stay there – and teleport their bodies away as well?)
  • Alien Death Ray (did ET screw with my bitties?)
  • Sashimi (did Mina dare Max to swallow them whole? Did some wasabi and shoyu disappear as well?)

I fear I will never know.

Does anybody out there have a better guess?

The Boobie Mushroom and Leafy Mothra

Both recent finds when all I had was a crappy cell phone camera.

The boobie mushroom is the size of a large charsiu bau and appears after a heavy rain.

This is the first time I’ve seen this type of mushroom here and one can only wonder if licking the nipple would be deadly or not.

The leaf-winged moth AKA Leafy Mothra

I found Leafy Mothra in our driveway and captured it in an empty mustard jar for Max to see. He was duly impressed, as the entire body was blaze orange. Leafy Mothra was about 2″ long.

Friday finality

I think I’ve finally got this blog up and running the way it should be, so I feel great.

Woke up this morning, went to buy a traditional Isan breakfast of sticky rice and skewered BBQ pork, as well as some fried doughballs and a bag of rice porridge. Brought it all back home, got Max ready, and took him to school. Found a roadside vendor selling fresh durian and had him break down a small (~.75 kgs whole) one for Nam – she loves them (I merely tolerate them). Came home again to Mina babbling and scooting around madly on her baby walker. It’s been a perfect start for the day.

Around Mahasarakham: The Saengcharoen Theater (4711 Theater)

Across the street from our friend Tong’s house and cram school is a massive old theatre that’s been converted into a church. I’ve never taken photos of it or been inside, but I’ve admired it from the outside and parked in its shade many times.
I stumbled upon an excellent write up of the church (posted just two days ago) by a blog called The Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project, which is a “photographic archive of derelict or converted movie theaters in Southeast Asia.” Reading it makes me yearn for the days when many blogs were works of passion written about specific subjects…
I think I’ll ask Tong’s father about the significance of the number 4711, although I dig the idea of the Hopeful worshiping in the house of the occult.

Around Mahasarakham: The Cowboy Barber

Today Max turned two and when he fell asleep in the car, we took him to a barber on Srisawat Road famous for dressing like a cowboy (and cutting with shears instead of clippers). Nam held Max on her shoulder as cowboy barber man snipped away. Meanwhile, I was busy inspecting his shop, an older two story townhouse decorated with photos of him posing with other cowboy enthusiThais, Marlboro man swag like ashtrays and posters, a decommissioned muzzleloader, and a photo of Tom Selleck in cowboy attire!
This last detail ensures that daddy will also be going back for a cut there sometime, with camera.

Cornershop Kway Chap

Last week I visited at a noodle shop that I thought was new, but my coworker said it’s been around for a few years.
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This is mainly what they sell, standard kway chap noodles served Vietnamese style in clear chicken stock with rice noodles of medium thickness (you can also get instant ramen served in kway chap stock).
This is opposed to the other style of kway chap popular in Thailand, the Chinese kind in brown stock with blood cubes, bamboo shoots, and spiral flat noodles (this Chinese kind is usually done very poorly in Thailand IMHO, but when done properly, with fresh ingredients and duck meat, can be very tasty).
A vital key to surviving in any given area over an extended period of time is knowing the secret menus of your favorite haunts. The secret menu of this place was somewhat amusing:
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I loves me some chicken bones! (They use a bunch of these for the broth every day.)
Notes: This shop is located on Soi Srisawat between RMU and Spirit House Kway Chap, on the right side if headed away from RMU. Kway chap w/o egg 20 baht, w/egg 25 baht, chicken carcass 20 (25?) baht.

Blue kapom (Calotes versicolor) (correction: Calotes mystaceus)

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It took me three years to find one of the blue ones after I heard about them (and possibly ate them as well). This lizard is known in standard Thai as ginka and in Isan dialect as kapom. It has many names in English, including Oriental Garden Lizard, Eastern Garden Lizard, Changeable Lizard, Bloodsucker Lizard, Crested Tree Lizard, Garden Fence Lizard. They are Agamids, from the family Agamidae, commonly called dragons or dragon lizards. Here’s an informative passage from this page:

Changeable Lizards are related to iguanas (which are found only in the New World). Unlike other lizards, they do not drop their tails (autotomy), and their tails can be very long, stiff and pointy. Like other reptiles, they shed their skins. Like chameleons, Changeable Lizards can move each of their eyes in different directions.

I saw it on this tree at a restaurant my coworker and I were having lunch at, and it must have been mating season because there was another blue one, a half-red one, and one changing from tan to tan with spots before our very eyes! It was quite a sight, and I’ll definitely go to see them again sometime.
Note to self: I’m not sure of the restaurant’s name, but it’s in Maha Sarakham, out on the bypass between the crossroad to Borabu and the one to Wapi Pathum, 200 hundred meters before the road to Rui Sap (where my cop student got drunk on pineapple brandy and waved a glock around at everybody) on the left.

Update March 2023: Although the name of these lizards are the same in Thai and Isan languages (กะปอม/กิ้งก่า gabpawm/ginggaa), the red ones and the blue ones are actually different species. The red ones are Calotes versicolor, commonly known as Oriental Garden Lizard, etc. The blue ones are Calotes mystaceus aka the Indo-Chinese forest lizard or blue crested lizard; some of the research online (which I refuse to link to because it’s on a pay-to-access pseudo-academic research site) seems to indicate that these blue ones weren’t officially recorded in a nearby province (Ubon Rachatani) until 2018! I originally posted this article in 2010.

I’ve written some further information on a new post: Blue vs Red Kapom/Gapom Species

Thai Inter Hospital Mahasarakham aka Thai International Hospital Maha Sarakham

Having now experienced a C-section at both hospitals in Mahasarakham, my wife and I spent today comparing them and we’ve come to a conclusion: The government hospital is better for childbirth, and in a couple years (when construction of the new children’s wing is supposed to be completed) will probably be on par with anything Khon Kaen can offer with the exception of Khon Kaen Ram (which is on a different level than other hospitals in the region in many aspects, because of much deeper pockets).
Background: Our first baby, Max, was born a month early and as a breech baby, which necessitated a C-section (In Thailand, a Caesarean is called a “Caesar.” I personally prefer “Caesarean” to the Americanized version, “Cesarean,” because of the root origin.). We had been contemplating having the baby at one of the two hospitals in Khon Kaen mentioned above, but we hadn’t checked them out yet and when we got in the car, my wife didn’t want to endure the 45 minute drive to Khon Kaen. So we decided on the government hospital (Mahasarakham Hospital), mainly because Nam has good nurse friends there. We’d actually checked it out the day before and were apprehensive because (A) the facilities were old and dirty and (b) being a government hospital, there are masses of sick people lining the hallways (also, up here in the country, patients are often accompanied by entire families who lay out straw mats in the hallways for eating, waiting, and staying over). One thing that worked out in our favor was that while the natural childbirth rooms were appalling (three cots per room, no partitions, no air con, cobwebs and dirty acoustic ceiling tiles paired with ceiling fans, etc.), the surgical facilities were clean and modern.
The main problem with the government hospital, however, is overcrowding. There’s nothing like carrying your newborn through throngs of dirty and diseased to make you crave a clean environment… And that’s the main reason we decided to have shrieking child prodigy #2 at the private hospital, down the road behind SermThai department store, in downtown Maha Sarakham.
At first, it seemed like we had made the best choice, but a variety of factors proved this to be wrong. This hospital has just started a process of rebranding as Thai Inter Hospital Mahasarakham, which basically means that they have new letterhead and a new logo, and plenty of neato blueprints and design concepts posted around, but as of right now, it’s just a semi-old private hospital with a new name (as a side note, there was a poster in our room saying they have ties with this facility in Koh Samui). The first big problem was directly related to this rebranding process – they were completely redoing the room directly above the ICU with sledges, hammer drills, tile saws, the whole bit. This was a bit disconcerting, to say the least… I briefly entertained the idea of wheeling Nam and the baby out of the hospital and up the street to the public hospital. It was pretty bad. Luckily, the nurses let me take the baby up to our private room and Nam followed an hour later when she got cleared from the ICU. This problem is a temporary one, but there were other problems that were rooted deeper in the system.
The nurses were mostly inexperienced. Some were young and inexperienced, other were inexperienced with newborns. This is a big problem in a maternity ward. Luckily, this was our second time, so we could recognize shaky decisions and when to question them.

  • The only pediatricians on staff (1 or 2) were part time and visited only once a day.
  • Overall, doctor visits were too few and seemingly meaningless. Random doctors would wander in, glance at the baby, comment on the musical teddy bear we’d brought to sit next to her (thanks, mom!), and as we later found out, bill us for their presence.
  • The sheets and hospital gowns were old, cheap, worn out, and worst of all, poorly designed and ill-fitting. We were willing to pay extra for better service than could be had at the government facilities, so we wanted better basics.
  • The FREE! WIRELESS!! INTERNET!!! was broken and nobody knew how to fix it…nobody even understood what was broken… I immediately recognized this situation as hopeless and subscribed to DTAC internet service on my mobile (200 baht for 100 hours/month) and tethered it to my notebook.
  • Billing problems… even the hospital administrator in charge of our account eventually admitted to irregularities and cut 30% off our bill. We had to work for it, though. The basic problem was that they tried to get us to pay for extraneous items, be they things like a (seemingly complementary) bag of cheap toiletries at 10 or 20 times markup, or meaningless services like official doctor visits where the doctor gets a cut for just being in the room for a minute… and It’s not like we aren’t aware that this is standard practice elsewhere, it’s just that we are unwilling to accept it. So we pulled our ace and simply stated that if they insisted on unfairly charging us, we’d let everyone at both our universities know about it. So yeah, they cut down the bill three times and it eventually came to 30% of the original amount… But the very fact that they started out at such an overinflated figure hints at an endemic problem.

So far, it’s taken me eleven days to get this post to this point… and both babies are crying again…