Photos
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Max loves bitter melon (bitter gourd)
How very, very strange. We’ve never heard of a child liking this stuff. Bitter melon is called mara in Thai, and nigauri in Japanese (goya in Okinawan). It’s much the same in both countries, although we’ve found the Japanese variant (the one used in famous Okinawan dishes such as chanpuru) to be more bitter and astringent. The Thai version is a paler green than the Japanese ones. Basically, in all three cultures it is recognized as having beneficial medicinal properties (hypoglycemic effect and antioxidant activities). To be quite honest, the Japanese variety was too astringent for my taste; the ones we are getting here in Thailand (about 16 inches long…
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Getting Musical (Thai Ranat Xylophone & Toy Snare)
The Doraemon snare is a $5 cheapie we bought at the bicycle/toy store in Kalasin where we went to buy a baby seat for the nanny’s bicycle a month ago. The wooden xylophone is called a ranat (or more specifically, a ranat ek) which was donated to the Yoshida Instrument Collection by Tanaka-sensei, a close friend who is leaving Sarakham at the end of the month. The ranat is tuned by placing wax lumps along the underside of each wooden slab; all of these have fallen off and we need to find somebody who knows how to tune it. Hopefully there will be someone at Nam’s university since they have…
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Sunny Day
The view from our front porch.
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Banana Flower Photo
When a cluster of bananas appears on a tree, you wait a while and lop off the flower (which grows upside-down from the bottom of the cluster’s stalk). This is from the biggest tree in our backyard, of which there are always 5 to 10 in various stages of growth (I cut them down after we harvest the bananas, and new ones sprout up next to the stumps). A banana flower is a beautiful thing. It looks like something out of a Giger sketch.
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A photo of Max and mommy the other day
We keep forgetting to take photos of her “bump”, which although not evident in this particular photo, is quite… big.
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Pinky
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shooz
We just figured out today (the photo was taken two weeks ago) that he was imitating one of his favorite Baby Signing Time DVDs.
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Angry Max drinking light
After a while, Max realized that light is completely bland and unsatisfying.
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Max drinking light
He keeps trying to drink light from flashlights and it’s quite hysterical.
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Max @ 10.9 kilograms
I don’t know why I like this vacant look so much, but I do. I think it reminds me of spacing out so much when I was a kid – when my imagination was unbound by the constraints of adult reality.
