Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
This was all all procured locally. This part of the world will be hit with a metabolic syndrome epidemic in the coming years that will surely rival that of Mexico and their pudgy northern neighbors – we have a Starbucks three minutes from my house, for Christ’s sake.
Note: This round of Hate Gaijin Expansion may be finished for now.
Forty years of failed US drug policy has culminated in my daughter wearing what appears to be an anti-hemp headband in her preschool parade in Thailand… A country where you can buy marijuana-seasoned chicken soup (not easily, but still), but where possessing it can get you all kinds of ganked, gaffled, or even shot by the police, all thanks to US drug policy.
In fairness, there were also anti-drinking, -smoking, and -injecting headbands worn by other kids, and the only thing frowned upon among those by Theravada Buddhism is the alcohol. That’s why Buddhism is so fucking cool – in a place with such high road fatalities due to DUI, it actually makes sense!
In the past couple of years, the pond in front of our house got seriously overgrown on the banks (as well as on the surface) with reeds, vines, and other opportunistic vegetation. Yesterday, the banks were cleaned up with a Caterpillar 313b excavator:
The road hasn’t been cleaned up yet, and I’m not sure that it actually will be (since the predominant way of thinking is that it will get washed away by the rain – even if rainy season is half a year away!), and the weeds need to be pulled off the surface of the pond, but it’s good start. Here are some before-and-after pics:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
Enthralled by the rumble of heavy machinery, I took some video of the big, beat up machines working:
When the dumper took off to unload nearby, I noticed that the excavator was scooping mud from the pond. The operator got and out and started rooting around the bucket… He was fishing!
A bit slow with the camera, I didn’t take video of him grabbing a freshwater eel or the fat, brutish snakeheads from the bucket, but I did get a good shot of what was left:
I have no idea what kind of snake it was.
After the work was done and the machines had retired for the day, I found a slightly smaller specimen of the snakeheads (this species is actually called the Giant Snakehead) I had seen earlier, wiggling around on the road. I saved it to show the kids when they got home:
While the cat operator was saving his catch to eat (we went so far as to ask how he would cook them: “spicy stir fry!”), we were not. I originally thought I would give our snakehead to a random worker on the street for dinner – this is a prized eating fish, I just refuse to eat from what I know is a polluted water source – Max got really upset about it. He asked of we could keep it, and I told him he had to choose between keeping our current fish, an antisocial plecostomus and a juvenile gourami, or just the snakehead (since the snakehead will kill, but necessarily eat, any other fish in the tank). The one(s) we didn’t keep would have to be thrown back to the pond. He chose the snakehead, but I talked him out of it by basically explaining that snakeheads, this species in particular, are vicious little assholes, and that I’d need to feed it other poor little fishies on a regular basis. The snakehead ended up being thrown back from whence it came, simultaneously dooming other little denizens of the pond and making merit for us by returning an animal back to nature.
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It occurs to me that my go-to book on local fish species backs up the stories I’ve heard about this fish perfectly:
Ophicephalus micropeltes
Laotian: PA DO
Thai: Pla Chado
Cambodian: Trey Chhdor (diep for small ones)
Vietnamese: Ca Bong
Others: Toman (Indonesia and Malay)NOTES: Maximum length about 1 metre, usual length 30 to 70 cm.
This fish has an unpleasant character. According to Hellei it attacks isolated Khmer fishermen. Worse, it is one of the few fish which devour their own young, at least in certain circumstances. Maxwell explains that the parents protect their offspring to begin with but then, when the little ones are big enough to fend for themselves, drive them from the nest. It is those which are too obstinateto leave which are eaten. The Malays have a saying: “Bagai toman makan anak”. This means “like the Toman fish which eats its own young”; the phrase is applied to persons in high places who misuse their powers, oppressing those whom they should protect.
CUISINE: Some say this is not quite as good as the preceding species (pla chon); but it is still of high quality. The firmness of the flesh makes all the snakeheads suitable for fish salads and cold fish dishes.
– Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos by Alan Davidson
The only thing I can add to this is that the latin name for this fish species seems to have changed more than once. It seems that the currently accepted name for it is Channa micropeltes, the Giant Snakehead.
I’m fairly satisfied with my monthly TrueMove H internet subscription; it’s fast enough and I’ve never run out of my monthly high-speed allowance (although I am careful not to download or stream too much with it). One thing that always bugged me about it, though, was the number of stupid spam messages I would receive from True, especially since I’m using this SIM with a Nexus 7 tablet (that doesn’t even have a phone function!).
Eventually, I got around to looking it up and found that it’s very easy to unsubscribe from the SMS spam sent by True themselves:
That’s it!
The only problems I have found after doing this for a few friends are that sometimes the system gets overloaded, and sometimes True has no control over 3rd party spammers – in which case you should look for an app to help filter your spam while praying feverishly that the spammers quickly die horrible deaths and are reborn as toilet brushes.
Monkey Holding Peach Brand Co., Ltd., or alternatively, White Monkey Holding Peach Brand, are the manufacturers of the original “Tiger Balm” type ointment. This is the OG shit right here. They deserve your respect just for having the coolest brand and company name… If I ever have the chance to work with them, I’ll do it just so I can write it on my CV.
Shooting (through) security bars mounted on a temple window in Laos.
We have several guests arriving next week, including my brother and sister from the states. We were going to pick them up in Bangkok and head to the beach, possibly Koh Samet, but that seems impossible now that they’ve effectively destroyed all the beaches and marine life with the oil spill.
I guess we’ll have to go somewhere else so we don’t have to smell the seafood for oil before we eat it as recommended by government officials. You can’t make this shit up.
Even if you could smell crude oil on a deep-fried delicacy, does anyone even know what the chemical dispersants smell like? Because they probably aren’t very good for you either, seeing how they can kill coral and that “laboratory experiments showed that dispersants increased toxic hydrocarbon levels in fish by a factor of up to 100…”
@ the Cobra Village in Khon Kaen, Thailand
