Photos
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My Dream Meal
A friend sent this to me. I don’t know who made it, took the photo, or ate it, but I want it. I don’t know if I’d be more excited selling this or eating it – it’s damn near the perfect triple order of Thai Basil Stir Fry with Crispy Pork topped with Star Eggs. I spent a whole month perfecting this dish during lockdown, making the crispy pork from scratch with a different recipe each time. It was epic, and this is truly one of my top 10 favorite Thai dishes (of which basil stir fries occupy two or three spaces).
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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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Killer Mantis
@ our back porch railing around 8 months ago. He was warming up before the hunt:
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They call me Goldforker
Yes, it’s our old friend, Crispy Pork Basil Stir Fry. From a now-defunct resto of our friends, shut down due to high rent and the first COVID lockdown (2020). I never got around to posting the pic and giving them their due… It was good while it lasted.
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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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Issan Lunch
Can’t remember where this was, but looking at it makes me hungry.
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Mr. Organ Donor
Some guy used his American ID to make a store member’s card in Thailand: From r/thai: LINK
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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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Mosquito eating banana toast
It seems I forgot to upload this but it was taken a bit more than a year ago, during the first lockdown, when fears were high, but there was only a single case of coronavirus in Maha Sarakham province, imported from Buri Ram. We are now on our third self-imposed lockdown and this third wave was the largest for our town (over a hundred infected), and Thailand as a whole. The kids were spreading it in between lockdowns at bars and outdoor pubs. Things were all back to normal for maybe a month or so, then one superspreading student brought it back from Bangkok partying. I’ll be teaching classes online…
