Category: Exploits

About 3 hours to Chiang Mai

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Justin Yoshida’s location@2:26pm,12/26 Huai Rai, Den Chai, Phrae http://m.google.com/u/m/AL6Y8s

Everybody warned us about the long, windy mountain roads on the way to Chiang Mai, but they aren’t bad at all. I guess it’s because there isn’t a hill in sight standing on the tallest building in Maha Sarakham (my uni’s admin building). I’m moblogging this and eating with Mina right now, and we are in the windiest roads of the whole trip.

The scenery in these mountains looks a lot like Japan, except for the abundant banana trees. I’d rather be sliding around these corners in my old Silvia with speakers blaring ADF instead of bouncing around in a university van, but then again, who wouldn’t?

BTW, Max and Mina are being veritable angels so far.

The Accidental Motorcycle Thief

The other day, I wanted to go for a quick lunch at the canteen (cafeteria), so I asked one of the students interning for the Japanese course if I could borrow her scooter. She gave me the key and told me where it was parked, along with a description. She said the license plate number was 85, and that it was a 100cc Honda Wave, with a manual transmission, in gray.

I found the 100cc manual Honda Wave almost immediately, but noticed that the license plate was actually 58 and that it was blue with gray accents. I chalked it up to the student remembering it wrong, or me hearing it wrong, and decided to test it by trying to start it up: No problem. I rode off in the direction of lunch, happily upshifting with my foot in this age of boring automatic plastic bi-wheeled conveyances.

When I got back on the scooter after lunch, the key was harder to turn. I had to work at it a bit. Then, when I got back to my building, I couldn’t turn the key to the far left to lock the steering column. I tried for a few minutes doing the jiggle-turn maneuver, but finally just gave up. When I went back to my office, I told the intern that I couldn’t lock her bike and asked if she’d had problems with her key, but she had no idea what I was talking about. A warning sign flashed briefly in my head.

“You said your plate number was 5-8, right?” I asked.

“No, I said 8-5,” she said.

Uh-oh.

I  looked down at where I’d parked the bike and saw a girl wiping tears from her eyes, our building’s custodian trying to console her, and a security guard talking into a walkie talkie.

I went down and apologized, and in the end, everyone except the victim had a good laugh about it (she was still in shock at having her scooter stolen). I felt bad for making her feel bad, but also because the first time I stole a bike, [A.] it was only 100cc, [B.] it required no skill because of the worn lock, and [C.] it provided zero exhilaration because IT WAS A TOTAL ACCIDENT.

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?

max’s wittle bitty

Just about a month ago, we had a big storm come in at night due to a typhoon battering Taiwan. It rained a lot more than normal, even for rainy season, and the pond in front of our house must have flowed over onto the road at some point during the night. I say must have because I didn’t actually see it happen, but found some evidence to that effect including washed up debris on our curb and a half-dead pla salit (Snakeskin Gourami). Upon poking with my finger, he wiggled a bit, so I decided to try reviving him in a spare six liter PET water bottle I had in the yard.

I filled it with water from the pond and slipped him in through the top, and after performing carefully measured agitation to stimulate oxygen transport over the gills (read: shaking it for a while), Mr. Gourami “turned that frown upside down” and started swimming around.

Thus was born the Ghettoquarium in all its polyethylene terephthalatiffic glory:

Snakeskin Gourami (Trichogaster pectoralis) aka Siamese Gourami aka Bitty

Max was delighted and immediately dubbed the fish “Bitty” (it was not until later that I realized he was trying to say “fishy,” but by then I had gotten used to calling him Bitty as well).

Bitty received due adulation from his attending 2.5 year old host, including being assaulted with long cooking chopsticks and drinking straws joined end-to-end (which daddy was using to occasionally blow air into the bottle just for the hell of it). But as cool as this fish was, and as much as Max loved him, I decided to let him go at the end of the day because I wanted him to go live with his friends in the pond. Also, I had no desire to find out which aquatic plants he could eat by trial and error – I knew he ate plants because that’s what it said in my go-to SE Asian fish book, Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos by Alan Davidson.

In addition, Max gets bored with new toys almost instantly, so we thought we could get away with Bitty just suddenly disappearing… This is how we ended up going out as a family to buy a small aquarium less than two hours after I threw Bitty back in the pond, but that’s another story.

For now, I choose only to commemorate a boy and his fish:

How to defeat a breathalyzer test in Japan 5 years ago, or Thailand today

Put your mouth up to the apparatus and make a show of drawing a deep breath. When you exhale, do it through your nose instead of your mouth, but obviously not in a way that will be noticed by the people administering the test. Basically, you are aiming to make a sound like you are exhaling into the apparatus while not actually doing so.

At least, that’s what I hear.

The best way to avoid trouble at all is of course to avoid drinking and driving entirely.

But hey, work drink-ups are a bitch, I know.

Ulan

The other day, I was dozing off in the pre-dawn glow coming through the French windows in our living room when I suddenly remembered something that happened on the flight back: Having survived the thirteen hour leg from Bangkok to Incheon with two cranky babies and zero sleep (and also having taken a capital D with hyperized Max present in the aircraft lavatory – one of my proudest achievements and a story in itself), we stiff-legged it off the plane like penguins and waited around the nearest room for our stroller to be produced.
An unkempt old lady with crazy eyes came up to me and started asking for help in what I first thought was Korean. I tried to tell her that I couldn’t speak Korean, but she would not be dissuaded and continued to plead with me in guttural tones. While I was wondering what she wanted, I noticed she had a little nappy haired girl in tow, who had rosy cheeks and was crying inconsolably. After a while, the old lady put two boarding passes in my hand and said, “Ulaanbaatar.”
“Oh, Mongolia?” I asked.
“Mongolia,” she confirmed. Now having identified the language I totally couldn’t understand, I flagged down one of the Korean Air staff members hanging around and asked him to help the old lady, as she was noticeably limping. The man wouldn’t help out and just told us to move down the hall to the transfer area. Fucker.
Nam and I looked at each other, and decided to help them out. Both of us were taking care of a baby and carry ons, so we weren’t moving quickly anyway. The old lady’s limp looked really bad and the little girl would start wailing every time she was put down. I offered to carry a brown shopping bag the old lady was carrying in addition to a big black backpack.
We only walked a minute or so until we hit a line of people waiting to get through security checks to the transfer area. I was so zonked and busy trying to keep the kids happy that it didn’t register until the very last minute that I was carrying somebody else’s bag through a security check. A brief flash of paranoia and bad Hollywood-induced visions nearly froze me in place, but I ran up to the old lady and put the bag on the scanner conveyor next to her backpack.
// //
When the man working the x-ray scanner saw the bundle of det cord wrapped around a take out box full of spicy Mongolian Barbecue, he hit the panic button and drew his sidearm in one smooth motion, but it was too late. The “old lady” and “little girl” had already stepped out of their human hosts and begun weaving death and mayhem.
First they triggered the bomb, which atomized the meat slathered in special chili sauce, blinding everyone in a ten foot radius, including several guards. Then they pulled scythes from the black backpack and went for the throats of anyone moving.
They came for me, too, but I made the sign of an ancient Mongolian god in the air and whispered, Ulaanbaatar, Ulaanbaatar, Ulaanbaatar, and they left us unharmed. Nobody else made it out alive, though. The spirits needed blood, and they took it from fat tourist and tough Korean grandma alike that day.