Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
A friend showed me some homework his students turned in last week (the assignment was to bring in examples of different charts, graphs, diagrams, etc.) and I had to pass along the joy:
Yes, they will be graduating university in a few years, and yes, you may pay them minimum wage.
They are knocking down our “Little House on the Prairie” schoolhouses and will soon replace them with new facilities. They were probably the oldest buildings on campus with solid wood construction, and were a lot cooler than the concrete buildings that have come to represent typical SE Asian construction… In recent years, some of the rooms had been upgraded with whiteboards and sound systems, but there was nothing like going into class every morning and asking students to clean the blackboard erasers.
They would knock the erasers on the outside wall below the window sills, which is how students coming in late could hear that class was starting. These classrooms were a pain to teach in on the hottest days, but were still more comfortable than their modern uncooled counterparts in our newest buildings (one of which is the tallest building in Sarakham yet boasts classrooms with no AC, broken desks, and in the ghettoiest rooms, blackboards as well).
These were mostly used as auxiliary classrooms and our English program will eventually move from our home in an old administration building (Building 4) to the new buildings whenever they are finished. Reversely, the prior occupants of Buildings 1&2 (including Thai Dance, Music, and Thai Language departments) have come to replace the Law department in our building, so instead of meeting aspiring ambulance chasers in our hallways, we are now serenaded by glorious band practice sessions and Thai dancing below the stairwells. We’re so used to it. it’s hardly even surreal anymore..
Tagging along with friends who got an upgrade to an executive suite… Welcome drink, sir? Champagne. The room keycards have leather jackets and there’s a Herman Miller chair in the room.
Double Whopper with cheese. 6 am.
…while Max contemplates pushing his sister over (don’t mess with her when she has that look in her eyes, boy!).
(taken at a local temple being used as polling place for the national election; we were waiting for mommy to cast her ballot)
It’s amazing how when I repeatedly called all three (Max! Mina! August!), only one would look up at a time. Then again, it was ice cream time.
This was taken last week at Rajabhat Maha Sarakham, my university, at a welcoming ceremony for freshmen (aka “freshies” in Thailand). In the foreground, English program students are praying during a traditional bai sri ceremony around a Christmas tree-shaped arrangement of folded banana leaves, as other students play takraew on the courts in the background and molam blasts from the unseen stage to the left.
This was waiting for an engine swap at my mechanic’s shop yesterday. I vote for a supercharged V8 diesel for a balance between economy and kicking ass.
The Kodak DC120 was the first megapixel camera I owned. I got it back in 1998 or so and maybe sprung for an enormous 4Mb compact flash card as well, to add to the industry-leading 2Mb internal memory in the camera (enough to store 2 whole photos in RAW mode, but they didn’t call it RAW yet, it was simply described as uncompressed).
After I posted about the iPad 2 yesterday and decided against pitting its hapless camera against the one on my phone, I realized that I might have photos in my archives with which the iPad2’s test photo could be compared. My digicam archives go back to 1998, spanning those years with shots from different models of Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Sony, Ricoh, Sanyo, Kyocera, Panasonic, Fuji, Casio, Toshiba, Leica (!!), and numerous spotty models of indeterminate Chinese/Taiwanese/Korean manufacture (I even have shots from a camera that apparently embedded a paid porn site URL in the EXIF data — can’t figure out who’s camera it was, though). All of these cameras proved to be more capable than the iPad 2’s camera(s). Finally, browsing through some shots with the Kodak DC120 that Nam took in Yasothon Province, Thailand, during the annual banfai rocket festival, back in 1999, I found some comparable shots taken on an overcast day. Here’s one:
The iPad 2 photos from yesterday’s post:
Aside from the lighting, I think the state of the art digital camera from 1997 actually stands up fairly well with the best-selling tablet computer* of today.
