The guy running the train ride understands kids better than most of the grade school teachers I’ve met.
Category: Exploits
Silverlake Vineyard, Pattaya
Awesome view!
…and the biggest eggplants of this round Asian variety I have ever seen.
This is, however, the only vineyard I’ve ever seen with fake grapevines (presumably for evergreen photo props).
Random Temple in Hua Hin
From our work trip that I brought the fam along on. Damn those power lines.
Babyblade CBR fun
My friend Ben just bought a used 2011 Honda CBR250R w/ABS in Pattaya and brought it back to Sarakham. I helped him out a little with the details of the transaction and choice of bike, so of course, I got to try it out. Perhaps today wasn’t the best day since it was drizzling and quite windy out on the highway, but that did not deter us.
The bike was lighter and more refined than I expected – I would say it’s more tame than beast. The single-cylinder engine is very smooth and steady, and the bike is very quiet with the stock exhaust (even if it is wrapped with a faux carbon fiber sticker – which according to the internet, grants about 3 extra hp). In my mind, the CBR 150 is more fun at lower speeds, but the 250 is great for cruising on the highway (and probably even more fun when the wind isn’t kicking grit into your face at high speed).
Until this point, I had been riding the CBR around town and Ben was following on my scooter. When we stopped, Ben said he wanted he wanted to ride bitch to “see how girls felt,” so he got on the back and I pretended to be a twenty-something French guy on a glorious circuit around the Maha Sarakham bypass. Getting into the role of a racer-playboy, I recommended embedding a switch-activated vibrator in the rear seat cushion for increased high-speed thrills. For his part as a scared young Thai girl, Ben kept saying, “slow down, Ajarn, slow down!” (I was actually riding very slowly since I’m no longer invincibly young).
It was a lot of fun.
Line seems to be the best option for Burma telecommunications
Like it says in the title, Line.
My wife is in Myanmar/Burma for a week. I looked up the best options for calling to/from that country before she went, but the telecom market is in a state of constant flux and it seems they the government controls the sales of SIM cards. What sad state of affairs: Third world telecom service with first world bureaucracy!
As it turns out, most of the airports and hotels she’s been to have had barely decent wifi, which has left us experimenting with voice/video chat services. Here are the results for using chat apps on Android to/from Yangon, Mandalay, and maybe other places in Burma:
1st place: (Naver) Line
Excellent voice quality even on weak connections. If there was a major disaster, this is the app I would rely on (oh yeah, that’s why it was made in the first place).
2nd Place: Google Hangouts
Fairly stable, but laggy with both voice and video calls. Consistently laggy, though (about 1/2 second), so usable if you want to speak slowly and wait for responses.
3rd place: Skype
Skype changed my world, then abandoned it. I still have most of the money I put into Skype credit 7 or 8 years ago. TOTALLY UNUSABLE FOR ANYTHING UNLESS YOU LIVE IN KANSAS CITY AND GET FORCE-FED INTARWEBS FROM GOOGLE. Seriously, I’m going to uninstall Skype from all my devices. So fucking sad.
Mina and a Monkey
@Khao Kheow Open Zoo, Chonburi, Thailand
Nice Toilet Kit (Dusit Princess Korat)
We rockin rock glasses, foo!
We leverage Agoda points gained by using our account for official trips, and can stay at all but the most expensive hotels in Thailand for very reasonable amounts.
Korat Street Art
Some good, some not so good.
The first two seem to have been walls for a building some time in the recent past, but now just serve to host art and demarcate the boundary of this lot.
Lego Time @Highway Rest Stop 90km from Korat
I don’t know the name of the town because I couldn’t be bothered to look at my phone’s location. However, it’s only fair to note that this is the first fueling station I’ve ever seen to have two 7-11s – one for the petrol station and another, newer one for the LPG filling station; they were about 120 meters apart across the huge parking lot.