Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
If I had a celestial chariot, that’s the kind of wheel I want on it.
At a holy site in Nam Phong, Khon Kaen, that I possibly misidentified on Maps due to it being next to or possibly on the grounds of a large temple. I have asked some locals about it, and it’s still not clear.
#dharmawheel #wheelofdharma #wheelofthelaw
A stall selling wigs at Robinson Roi Et shopping mall. It must be noted that the number of the stall is also shorthand for the name of the city, Roi Et, which means “a hundred and one.”
According to Wikipedia:
The name of the province literally means ‘one hundred and one’ (Thai: ร้อยเอ็ด; RTGS: roi et ). Correctly, the number should be “eleven” (Thai: สิบเอ็ด; RTGS: sip et ), as the province was named after its eleven ancient gates built for its eleven vassal states. In ancient times, the number “eleven” was written “๑๐๑” (101) and the provincial name was written accordingly. Later, people took “๑๐๑” to mean ‘one hundred and one’ and have since then called it “Roi Et”.[4]
“Roi Et” is also jokingly called “LA” by the locals.
My student wore this to class and when I asked to take a photo, he asked me if I’d heard of it before. I answered truthfully. Actually, with the Thai pronunciation of this word, it doesn’t matter if that missing consonant is there or not, it sounds exactly the same.
We hadn’t been there since it opened, and the food was much improved: Bombay Indian Cuisine Roi Et
Related Newsflare from Feb: Tesla ‘bug’ causes car to brake when it sees ‘people standing on back of bus’
There was a resurgence of interest in “Thai Chicanos” last year, resulting in a few articles and videos across the web. The most entertaining video, however, is the one from almost a decade ago, about the “Cholos of Bangkok,” by Coconuts TV.
Also last year, an interesting YouTube video documenting “Japan’s Chicano Culture In LA” was published by Peter Santenello:
However, the true counterpart to the “Cholos of Bangkok” is “Inside Japan’s Chicano Subculture” by the NYT:
From a language and culture standpoint, all of these are enthralling. I’ve watched them all multiple times and pick up on new details every time.
No photos here, just a link to a 13 year old post I updated about some local lizard species which are called the same thing in Thai/Isan languages: กะปอม/กิ้งก่า), but ended up being distinct species with different common names: Oriental garden lizard (Calotes versicolor) vs. Calotes mystaceus (the Indo-Chinese forest lizard).
For the sake of posterity, I hereby shorten their names to Bob(s) and Dan(s). Bobs are the red ones, Dans are the blue ones (did you know that roughly 75% of people on social media would have used apostrophes to indicate plurality in that sentence?)
Update: Uh oh, there are Emmas (green when mating) in Thailand as well: Calotes emma
Further update: There are also some references to a species called Calotes goetzi which is treated as a separate species on some pages, but is also reported to have replaced Calotes mystaceus (who I just call Dan[s]) altogether according to this page, which also says that Dan is called กิ้งก่าหัวสีฟ้า (ging ga hua si faa) in Thai. This literally means the “gin ga (forest lizard) with a blue head,” which I immediately think is weird, because a much larger area than just the head turns blue, and also, every local I’ve ever talked to has just called it a “blue forest lizard” in Thai – there is no reason to be more specific, especially when it’s less accurate.
Having lived and worked at a large company in Japan for over a decade, I got used to dealing with red tape, idiot bureaucracy, and daunting stacks of interoffice paperwork and documentation. When I moved to Thailand to live a “simpler” life, it never occurred to me that I might find a tangled mess of paperwork to rival that of any developed country. However, today I find myself in the crossfire of two separate government offices that simply cannot agree with each other and hope to silence the other by firing enormous salvos of paperwork at each other.
It seems like every other day I’m getting a new form from one office, demanding that I provide a detailed answer to every request, and then almost immediately afterwards another form from the other office, with significantly different and sometimes contradictory requests. I try to explain the situation and provide the correct answer, but it doesn’t seem to help.
One of my favorite Thai Indy bands, even though I only have one… Juijui took the iku iku iku / itai itai itai jokes of the pre K-pop peak to the next level; homeboy was basically a genius who could be very cringe, as my kids would say.
This one is pretty amazing for a guy who doesn’t seem to have studied Japanese very much.
