This is a “side attraction” at Wat Srisawat, located on Srisawat road in Mahasarakham. The other side of the building pictured above features a collection of concrete animals. I took photos of them last year; I’ll try and dig them up.
Category: Thai Society/Culture
Water!
Nam was trying to sleep in this morning as Max has been keeping her up at night for the past few weeks, but the funniest thing happened: A man selling jugs of distilled water drove his pickup by the front of the house yelling, “nam na krup! nam na krup!” (water! water!), so Nam came running out of the bedroom a couple minutes later rubbing her eyes and asking who was here…
When she saw the guy selling water down the street she asked me to please kill him.
New Years in the Fields – Preview
This is a preview to a photo series I shot during our New Years holiday. I’ve been meaning to put it together since I shot it but Max got sick and life got in the way, etc., etc., and so forth (quote from KoS). I’m now busy doing other things, but perhaps I’ll get around to it this weekend.
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On the second day of the new year, our nanny invited us to her village for the bi-annual emptying of a communal fishpond. We piled into our trusty ’71 Crown, picked up a Japanese teacher who wanted to experience village life, and headed out deep into the rice fields. Actually, we first stopped at our nanny’s village so we could follow a pickup out to the final destination. I always carry rubber mats, wooden planks, and a shovel in the back of my car to get out of mudholes and sandy spots encountered in the back country, but with the family along for the ride it was comforting to have an escort (also, you never know when a feral Brahmin cow will decide to play cape buffalo and it’s nice to have a pickup to play decoy in such situations). The road was non-existent in places and we simply drove over drained and harvested rice fields along the paths of least resistance; I only scraped bottom once when I misjudged the far side of a steep bump. Several times, the pickup driver stopped an got out to warn me about a particularly rough patch ahead and asked if I just wanted to stop and park, but choosing the right lines is something of an obsession when I’m driving and I was lucky enough to choose correctly that day.
We eventually arrived to within walking distance (perhaps half a kilo) of the pond, which was being drained with a pump attachment hooked up to an iron buffalo (large roto-tiller or walking tractor). While waiting for the pond to drain, most of the hunters were out looking for field rats. This is where I started photo documenting the day.
To Be Continued…
Big C Mahasarakham
In November 2008, Thai superstore Big C opened a branch store in Maha Sarakham, just a few minutes down the street from us. Life hasn’t been the same since, mostly in good ways since we pay less for more and no longer have to venture downtown to the small Tesco with shitty parking inside the SermThai department store. Also, there were certain things – such as sporting goods and bicycles – that were only sold at ridiculous markups at small stores until now, so watching said shops close up forever is satisfying on some very small, very human level. On the flip side, traffic on the main street in front of our house has increased greatly – sometimes making a U-turn in front of Big C is like sitting inside a supercollider and watching electrons whizz by.
Pu Yai Ban – Village Headman
Do you see what I see?
Close up:
Now there’s nothing remarkable about village headmen here. Every village has one, and there are presumably thousands of villages in this region alone. What’s remarkable is that (presumably) a village headman has taken it upon himself to advertise his position on his pickup.
I wondered about what kind of egotistical twat would have the nerve to do something so tasteless, so pointless, and so retarded… So I waited for him to return to his car for over twenty minutes. Sure enough: One self-important asshole in a pickup, not bothering to look before he pulled into traffic and almost crushing a passing biker, to go!
How cold is it in Thailand?
Well, up here in Mahasarakham (educational pearl of the northeast) it dropped to 13.5 degrees C last night (56.3 degrees F).
As long as we’re talking units I might as well drop a couple good links here:
- The Thai Meteorological Department’s page for Mahasarakham (more accurate than any other weather page out there for this area; I’ve checked them all)
- Converber – A standalone unit converter supporting tricky Thai units like rai
Last week it got about this cold so we put Max in between us at night. For the first time since I was a kid, I had a bed peeing dream; you know the kind where you see the toilet very clearly right in front of you and it feels so relieving when the pee starts flowing in beautiful rivulets into the bowl… I woke up very suddenly in the middle of the night, slightly damp and convinced I’d peed myself. Of course, Max woke up to tell me how funny it was that he’d peed all over me and the bed. Don’t ask me how he bypassed his extra large sleepy-time diaper; the kid’s a damn prodigy or something.
Rumors of a coup
There are rumors of an imminent coup in Bangkok again. It may happen, it may not. Our house and family is protected by sheer distance. The only reason I write about this at all is in case telecom service is interrupted; there’s really nothing to worry about.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Eating Mickey (or, how I overcame one of my last food prejudices)
I ask that you have an open mind about this post, because the conclusion may surprise you – it sure surprised me.
Here I am with my pal Mickey Rat:
Mickey was a gift from Max’s babysitter’s husband, who went hunting for the fat critters in the rice fields last Friday night. Mickey came dressed and with all fur removed, and upon first inspection seemed clean enough… Why then did the mere sight of Mickey’s long tail cause such feelings of repulsion and disgust in me? Therein lies the irony: Originally, we were to be given a much larger present, but it was determined that such a large specimen might turn us off to rodents all together (This was excellent foresight on the giver’s part.).
To sum things up, I fought through all the icky feelings and prejudices and decided on the spot that Mickey was going to roast on my trusty ghetto grill that very evening. I would call up some friends both to bolster my courage and share this important experience with someone. I had a plan, I had a rat… and I was going to eat it.
Ingredients for J’s Special Field Rat Marinade
- 1 tbsp. salt
- 1 tbsp. nampla (refined fish sauce)
- some ground black pepper
- 1/2 cup milk
- 30cc cheap whiskey
- whatever crusty remains you can sweep out of your herb drawer
- enough water to immerse rat
The milk is a trick I’ve seen used by grilled chicken vendors. I’d like to believe that there are enzymes in milk that help soften the meat, but the vendors just tell me they do it because that’s how they were taught by their friends. Unscientific bitches.
Anyway, I digress. Mickey was bound for the grill.
We (by that time friends had arrived) cooked the main course of the night quite slowly. First I seared both sides over the hot spots of the coals and then slow roasted 20 minutes to a side. The skin was quite fatty, like a suckling pig, and drips of juice caused merry flameups over the coals. It smelled… good. After the rat was halfway done, I also started grilling chicken wings which I had marinated in a same same but different kind of marinade. The idea was to use the chicken as a control, since basically everyone says everything takes like chicken.
So what does a fat, juicy field rat that’s eats rice almost exclusively (the people who hunt them know because they open their stomachs to see) taste like? Scroll down for our verdict:
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IT WAS DELICIOUS.
I couldn’t believe how good it was… First of all, it was perfectly grilled, but you could perfectly grill a marinated penguin and it probably would not taste very good. This was choice meat.
Yes, I would eat it again.
Yes, it did have overtones of chicken. No, it wasn’t smelly or gamey or gross in any way. The marinade and slow cooking rendered the meat soft yet pleasantly textured. The skin was crispy and closest to a roast suckling pig, I think.
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So the next time you encounter a story about how rat meat is coming into fashion in India again or how grilled rat outsells chicken in the Vietnam countryside, just remember: It may not just be because rat meat is cheap. It may very well be because it tastes good.
End Respite
We’ve been busy.
I am preparing many photos for posting here.
In the meantime, be happy that I’ve found proof of indigenous cowboys in Thailand:
Volunteering in Kalasin
Last week a few of us teachers were asked to visit some classes being taught on a volunteer basis by our Business English major students out in Kalasin. We went out without much info and assumed these were classes being taught at a school. As it turned out, one of our student’s family had created an ad hoc classroom outside their house and was hosting free lessons for two weeks since schools are mostly on holiday during October. Children from their village as well as neighboring villages attended, with younger kids coming in the morning and older ones in the afternoon, perhaps 30 kids per session.
The classes were being taught by a few of our students who stayed at the house for the duration of the project.
We went and basically had a lot of fun thinking up activities on the spot… I sweat a lot as it was a really hot day, so I can honestly say that I contributed a lot of salt to my polo shirt.
Our student’s house/farm has a shrimp pond out back, so our reward for lunch was huge platters of steamed prawns, raw prawns with garlic, and epic tom yum goong with shrimp the size of mini-lobsters in it.
We also helped out with the afternoon class and took a quick trip to a popular “beach” up the road just a couple kilos, at the Lampao Dam reservoir.
All in all it was a great day, and the dedication of our students really impressed us. When asked why they were doing it, they said they didn’t want to just waste their holidays away. Well done!