Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
Kubota convertible with sunshade driving around town every day with no plates and hazards flashing.
As a side note, I know this gent and he’s more of a classic than all of the twenty-odd cars in his collection… He collects all of the cars that he wanted in his youth, but couldn’t afford. Never knew he wanted a rice tractor, tho.
…and installing an SSD at the same time. This particular laptop has served me for seven years already and I would normally not bother, but SSDs are cheap and it will make a good Minecraft rig for the kids. I already installed Linux and Windows 10. God bless KMS Pico.
The problem, as it turned out, was a small piece of ABS from a case peg that had broken off and settled inside the cooling fan. Made the whole rig sound like it was going to explode.
It’s very rare to find someone who’s the master of so many things.
At our friend Turgay’s house having this wonderful Turkish salad with tomato, onion, parsley, mint and Cökelek cheese from Hatai, Turkey. This regional cheese is smoked, fermented, and has an otherworldly funk about it. Absolutely delicious.
Sticky rice topped with crispy pork rind and corn somtam. Unbelievably delicious dipped in somtam juice.
Whole smoked chicken.
Out of the blue, Mina told us that she and her best friend, on the last day of school (yesterday), had promised to have a picnic together today.
It was quite amusing to watch her put together a bag of snacks and water, and she even washed a plastic bowl and dried it carefully with a paper towel. But when it came to asking what time they were supposed to meet, she gave me a blank stare…
“She’ll just know, daddy, we’re best friends!”
Knowing which way this was heading, I asked if we all could go together. Mina agreed and we were soon hitting the McD’s drive thru and heading off to the park near her school for the picnic. Mina was of course devastated that her friend was not there and kept expecting her to show up throughout lunch. Afterward, she asked me why her friend hadn’t come.
I thought for a while and told her that you have to set a time when you want to meet somebody. Then she asked me if that’s why I’m always angry about people being late.
I found these crazy-looking plants in a local wet market at the base of Phu Rua National park in Loei province yesterday afternoon. An old lady was selling plants from the roadside and forest (Loei people are apparently known to be formidable foragers) across from a stall displaying animal traps, snares, and freshly skinned rats.
Nobody who has seen these photos (+/- a few hundred Thais in person and my wife’s Facebook) has ever tried these plants before. But the old lady told me how to prepare them, so we steamed them and ate with a green chili dip (the alternative was to make a soup).
As it turns out, the bigger of the two types of plant (the alien eye stalk one) was better than the smaller iceplant-looking one. If you ate the “eyes” one at a time, they were sweet, but the more you put in your mouth, the more bitter they got. Strange. The iceplant-looking one tasted like… well, like how I imagine iceplant to taste (Thank you, thank you).
Although I associate bitter vegetables with poison for some reason (college flashbacks maybe?), we suffered no ill effects from eating these unknown plants, maybe (Nam had a funny stomach feeling possibly due to the cold she was getting over). Overall experience: Exciting in good and bad ways, anticlimactic.
Mina renamed it. Cat is now known as Donut, although it still doesn’t listen to a goddamn word I say. This is why I like dogs. I generally don’t really care for cats, but they seem to be attracted to anywhere I move in the world, leaving litters of kittens on my every doorstep, and never listening to a goddamn word I say. Dammit.
The Crown needs to be stripped, patched, and repainted. The last time it was done, it was done poorly. I’m thinking about using a shop just around the way, so I can go watch over the work every day. Just need to save up some money now.. I’m sure I’ll have enough in a few years. Until then? An experimental mix of vinyl wrap patch, black ink markers, and spray paint. The Kujira Crown was apparently made in an era when Japanese steel wasn’t that great – so they made it thicker. There aren’t that many holes rusted through, except at the edges. It does need to be patched properly, though.