You know you are in for one fine shindig when you wake up at 5:30 AM to speaker stacks from hell:
A few weeks ago, we took off for our friend’s wedding in Ratchaburi (short: Ratburi), located a couple hours southeast of Bangkok and famous mostly for its floating market. We boarded the Friday night VIP bus in Sarakham and arrived at Mo Chit station on Bangkok at 3:30 AM, and proceeded directly to Nam’s aunt’s house in Lad Prao via taxi.
We spent the next day shopping for the new house and swimming in Bangkok smog, which is quite exhausting. (Note: We managed to satisfy some Mexican food cravings at Sunrise Tacos, finally – scroll to the last comment in this post for a short review)
Sunday afternoon we rented a gutless Toyota Altis and my sister-in-law, Nok, drove us out to Nutty’s house, charming and pastoral as hell, but as such, way out in the sticks. Asking locals for directions eventually got us to her house. Nutty and her relatives were in Pre-wedding Day Overdrive, so we helped out where we could. For me, where I could was in a plastic lawn chair, sipping on cold beer Chang, and getting eaten alive by monster mosquitoes, but I was just happy to see Nutty again after so long… I went through photo albums that she had put together in Japan, and saw all of the old gang hanging out at Tenri dam, at the beach in Wakayama, making the fake humpy humpy with deer at Nara Koen. It was hard to believe it was so long ago, and I started to feel really old, so I crashed out on the beautiful wooden floor.
A few hours later, the speaker stacks from hell started blaring molam and Thai golden oldies loud enough to hear at least a few miles away. I mean, it was so loud that it made the fish in the river next to the speaker stacks jump every time the speakers popped or crackled. I had to get up at 5 to move the rental car, which we had locked in the yard in front of the house the night before. By 6 AM, things were in full swing and much bridal preparation was afoot. I have long since stopped trying to make sense of the actions or reasoning behind soon-to-be-wed females, and just tried to stay out of the way. I didn’t have my Nikon, but I tried to take a few photos before, during, and after the wedding with Nam’s digicam.
All in all, it was a great day and a wonderful wedding – here’s to the new couple!
Category: Photos
Sometimes Life is Better on the Back of a Tuktuk
Currently going through photos I took earlier this year in preparation for a couple of big upcoming posts…
LANGBA – PenesamiG
In my previous post, I spoke of “fake brand name knockoffs that are loosely based on a famous item but a little too ironically so, giving you the impression that the person who designed it did so as an inside joke or something…” This is more precisely what I meant:
This is not your average copper top.
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These crappy and frankly, dangerous (look at the insane bulging on the rightmost one – they came this way!) Chinese knockoffs were bundled with a couple of LCD flashlights I took camping a few weeks ago.
The term “mutant knockoffs” has been coined for products like these.
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LINKAGE: Fake Products: Mutant Knock-offs on flickr
Justin of America – Justin Jeans?
Sometimes, a sign just hits you in the face:
Spotted in Khon Kaen, Thailand
Somebody painted my ass on a sign!
We’ve actually spotted Justin Jeans apparel – mostly t-shirts and sweatshirts – at cheap night markets, but not the actual jeans. The clothes we saw were of the extremely cheap variety, made of the thinnest cotton poly blend, designed so badly as to be unappealing anywhere but the poorest corners of the third world. Kind of like those fake brand name knockoffs that are loosely based on a famous item but a little too ironically so, giving you the impression that the person who designed it did so as an inside joke or something… Anyway, this got me to thinking and I half-assedly searched for the brand name of origin since I had never heard of Justin Jeans back in the states. I found this:
South Beach, a division of Sweat Shirt USA, Inc., will design, manufacture, market and sell the Justin Jeans line. The collection will debut for fall/winter 1993 and is described by Justin as a “contemporary line of American sportswear with a Western flair.”
1993? I assume from the lack of obvious search hits that Justin Jeans is defunct in the states… What if Justin Jeans live on only as tragically poor knockoffs in SE Asia? That’s like the coolest thing I’ve ever heard.
I also like the fact that my ass is famous now. Does that qualify me as a sex symbol? Justin Timberlake has nothing on me… I’m the Big Papa of Asian Americans teaching English in SE Asia, bioootches!
Sunset on Nodules
Taken at the English Camp we went on a couple weeks back.
(Nodules will be explained in a later post)
Embanking
In most of the world, there is no OSHA
I saw this shot when arriving to my building at school this morning. I passed by first, then turned around my car, got my camera out, then turned around again to make a second pass. It was much too far to get a clean shot drive-by style out the passenger-side window, but channel mixing in Photoshop is the impatient photographer’s lopsided wooden crutch – left in the attic until needed, and then suddenly irreplaceable.
Natty Dread
A few months ago I wrote about the dragonfruit trees in our backyard secretly blooming at midnight. Well, these are pitaya by day:
Bob must have been thinking of pitaya when he named his famous album.
These are the red-fleshed variety, which only grow half as big as the white-fleshed ones.
As it turns out, the universal truth about fruit (“best when fresh picked and grown organically with water buffalo cakes as fertilizer”) is especially true for pitaya: I can honestly say that the dragonfruit we grew tasted better than any I have tried until now, and I have tried many from roadside stands and markets alike. In fact, growing them naturally raised the overall flavor from “disappointing considering how exotic it looks / slightly and boringly sweet” to “tasty, almost delicious.” Overall, a wonderful result: I love seeing stacks and stacks of dragonfruit being sold at the roadside fruit stalls, but I’ll never buy one again.
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Bonus tropical fruit shot:
Our baby mango trees are already bearing fruit and straining under the weight!
Wild Animal Day / Akrachat’s Most Wanted
Since we live next to a forest, we are used to seeing both wild and domesticated animals just over the wall as well as in and around the house. Out of all of the creatures that we share space with, the ones that really pose problems are: Ants, termites, mosquitoes, and the tokay lizards. The insects are a problem for obvious reasons, and the tokays (two of which I recently caught off guard long enough to photo) are actually kind of beneficial because they eat cockroaches, beetles, and other large insects, but their mating calls are loud and go on all night for about half of the year.
For this reason, we seized the opportunity to capture and relocate one of these bad boys the other day, when we found him crawling on the first-story wall instead of his usual hangout under the eaves of the roof. We called a couple workmen in the neighborhood to come catch him, and they cobbled together a crude snare with a broomhandle and some string… which completely failed when it came to the task of actually catching the beast. The tokay laughed at their feeble attempts to ensnare it and ran back to the eaves.
Tokay: 1
Justin: 0
The next morning, however, it was time for a rematch. The same lizard decided to take a walk on the wall separating our yard from the adjacent forest, so I decided it was time to break out the heavy weapons: A foolproof snare made from heavy fishing monofilament and the top half of my trusty graphite-core jigging rod. Thus armed, I quietly stalked my prey and made no quick movements, sure of my impending success… The lizard backed away from the transparent snare, snorted at my feeble attempts to fool him with technology, and started running back toward the house (I noticed that tokays cannot run on horizontal surfaces as quickly as you would expect – they have kind of a clumsy, inefficient gait that works real well on walls, though). I just barely managed to cut him off and scare him back onto the wall.
Tokay: 2
Justin: 0
At this point, I realized that what was needed was a more direct approach, that is, someone needed to grab this bad boy behind the neck like a snake, and end this pussyfooting around crap. I also realized that I was way too much of a bi-otch to do it myself, so I did what any great leader does in a time of crisis: I delegated. There was a workman (a different one from the previous night) sweeping the street on our block, so we hailed him over to have a crack at it. The result of my getting the hell out of the way and letting a real man do the dirty work:
So the new tally would be:
Tokay: 2
Justin: I WINS, BITCH!
I took photos of the prisoner, prodded various parts of his anatomy (the foot pads of this lizard are absolutely amazing – they look like something out of a Giger sketch and have unbelievable sticking power – it gripped onto my fingernail and for a second, I thought I might lose it), and had him deported far away from my house. We paid the man for his services with 20 baht and a box of dried fish snacks. It was a very happy experience for everybody, except perhaps for the lizard. I have a feeling he won’t have a hard time finding enough insects to eat anywhere in this country, though. Unless the man took him home to eat, that is.
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Immediately after the tokay capture, Nam let out a scream from the back of the house where the sink for washing dishes is, because this little guy scared her:
And a few hours later, she spotted this huge (about as big as my hand spread out) butterfly on our window:
It was truly wild animal day; I look forward to it again next year, at the new house!
RE: The title of this post – Akrachat is the name of our neighborhood
Nam Nuong
Nam Nuong are the little grilled sausages on sticks shown below, but it’s also the name of this dish. It’s Vietnamese in origin, but I don’t know what it’s called there.
All of the ingredients are laid out on a rice wrapper and rolled up before eating, like a fajita.
The sauce is sweet and spicy, and full of roasted peanuts – the combination of all the fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs (including lettuce, cukes, green bananas, starfruit, mint, kaffir lime leaves, green chilies, and everything else in the photo that I don’t know the names for yet) is something that cannot be described, but must be experienced.