Around Mahasarakham
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Farewell, Uncle Chet
Our beloved cowboy hairstylist has passed from natural causes. He was a local philanthropist, often offering free cuts at pubs along the canal and various festivals in town. I just loved him because he was a hardcore cowboy that popped up here and there quite often. All four of us have had our hair cut by him many times over the years. He was a real pro, and will be missed.
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Pocket full of shells
We had to take our Mazda 2 Elegance (TH only sedan model) into the new dealer down the highway to fix the most annoying vibration in the world (which will require removing the dash so I’m totally not doing it myself). Anyway, someone cut me off on the way home just as this came up on screen in the windblown (windows open because it’s nice) Kujira: It was oh so aggro. ~ best RATM cover, evah! ~
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Sold my CRF today
Took some more photos and sold it for half of what I bought it for 8 years ago. It was fun to ride and served me well, and it was also the first vehicle I ever bought new… but I haven’t been able to ride it the past couple of years due to COVID, and the ethanol fuel mandated in Thailand just goes bad very quickly. I ended up having to replace the fuel pump and injector because the fuel had degraded into something nasty. Anyways, we put up an ad yesterday and got several interested parties calling today. A bike dude from Ubon Ratchatani made the drive out and…
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U-SUK Hotel in Maha Sarakham, Thailand
I drove by the other day just to make sure it was still there (it’s a few doors down from my co-worker’s language school). It was pretty much unchanged from the time this drive-by photo was taken in mid-2019. In Thai it’s actually pronounced, “oosak.”
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Gonna sell my CRF
I miss it already, it was the first and only motorized vehicle I’ve bought new. I took these photos at the hidden lake behind my faculty building, Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University.
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Online Teaching at Thai University
The biggest COVID wave so far spread through Maha Sarakham from a couple months ago, so my university postponed the new term until this week. I’m teaching four Public Speaking classes per week online. This is what a typical class looks like, with about 2/3 the students: I tell them they only have to turn on the camera when they speak because some of them are on weak connections or are connecting through mobile data plans, and it might save them money as well as improving performance. Thailand has good connectivity, though, and a lot of businesses share free wifi, so I use the first week to pinpoint who has…
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Bull
Somebody brought their bull to graze on Nam’s mom’s property. This is a fairly normal occurrence in rural Thailand. And this is as close as I dared get to it. I was wearing a shirt and tie because I’d just come back on the way home from teaching a training course at the Maha Sarakham Provincial Office of the Comptroller General, by far the longest name of anywhere I’ve ever worked (and even a long name by Thai standards). The first thing I had the trainees do was memorize their place of work in English. Anyway, this bull was just normal. Not angry, not scared, but not indifferent to our…
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Rat Sushi
This is one of the last photos I took on an outing before COVID lockdown. I checked, but they weren’t actually serving rodents of any kind, so we can chalk this one up to interesting Asian naming.
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Crown at Sunset
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Mahasarakham University Demonstration School (Elementary)
Oh, and yes, their school is abbreviated as “MUDS.” They all wear athletic shirts that say MUDS on their backs once a week on “sports uniform” days.
