Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
Road & Track published their first cool story online, maybe ever: The Glorious Madness of Japanese Dodge Van Racing
If I were still in Japan, I might be into that… Different and kinda expensive, but not overly weird. Then again, I think about my homie that drove around a Suburban and was constantly getting stuck parking spaces, narrow streets, and once, even a car wash, and it might give me pause. Still… Those oversize Watas are pretty awesome.
Check out the drifting from around 9:10!
Note: My Kujira Crown is still running strong and you can find every post on it by browsing through my Cars category.
Recently, there have been a lot of interesting JDM classics popping up in my Facebook feed for sale in Thailand. There’s nothing I would consider buying as most of the sellers are just asking for way too much, but it’s interesting to see these cars are still somewhat maintained. Here’s a few that caught my eye last week.
The HiJet is nearly identical to the one I had at university, except the one pictured has a sunroof. I rode this car so hard and created so many legends in it… We once packed 19 people in it and drove from Nara Koen to Amemura. I stood it up on 2 wheels with a parking brake turn while driving back home from Rumours. It may still currently hold the speed record from the top of Tenri Dam to Nara Kyoikudai via Terni Kaido.
Old iron on the road gets harder and harder to find every year, but the Provincial Electricity Authority still has a fleet of classic cherry picker trucks from Japan.
Mad props to this guy… Dickon mos def.
As a side note, these retro color scheme (yellow on black) license plates in CA are super popular, but seem strange to me when put on new cars.
What I wouldn’t do to bring the Crown here someday… My brother in law bought a cherry ’64 GTO convertible with a nice crate V8, perfect inside and out, and all I could think was… I miss my Crown.
But there are so many basic types and specific variants, as well as imported and domestically produced brands, it’s mind-boggling. Referring to any specific type as just “fish sauce” could be quite disastrous, depending on the context (who put pla dak in the nam pla?).
Bonus shot: Ultra dope station wagon in the Costco parking lot.
Alternate usages:
I wish Nissan would quit spending resources on clickbait and just make better cars… My RB-20 cries itself to sleep every night knowing that its great grandkids are (under) powering ugly hybrid bimbo boxes with whiny CVTs and ridiculous start/stop features.
Took me a while to get around to it, but this is the best documentary, ever. So, so many memories that basically defined my entire youth. In the whole series, there is exactly one album I don’t own, and I’ve used every hip hop album and artist mentioned in a mixtape or live set at some point (oh the time I had before we had kids lol).
I kept buying CDs long after Napster and Audiogalaxy, mostly because of the huge difference in sound quality those days, but I’ve only averaged about one or two per year in the past 10 years.
And I still load the Chronic in between Kendrick and Gucci every once in a while, because it will always be the king of car beats.
The weather has cooled considerably, which means cruising with the windows down.
I gotta say, it was a good day.
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:
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.