The other day we went to nanny’s village to see the flooded rice fields. The Chi River has overflowed into the fields, and huge invading catfish are happy to feast on drowned field mice and other flood detritus. Unwilling to take Mr. Max out on a flimsy boat, we watched the villagers go spearfishing for dinner.
It sure is a good thing we took the trusty old Crown out on the muddy roads instead of our pretty car.
Category: Thai Society/Culture
Thai immigration in Mukdahan
Our university sent us foreign teachers to Mukdahan yesterday for our annual visa renewals. Until now, we had been using th immigration office in Nong Khai, but the last time we visited for 90-day notice, they told us that the Mukdahan office was becoming the top office for the Isan region and that we should go there from now on. So the seven or eight of us rode out on a bus accompanied by 26 Chinese exchange students who are studying Thai in China at various universities and are on a program here for a year. 30+ visa applicants are enough to crowd any immigration office, and it was shocking to see how understaffed the Muk office was. Everything took a long, long time. It’s unreasonable to blame the people (the underlings at least) working there because they’re as trapped by the system as we are… It was hard watching other applicants* come and wonder where to queue up because the waiting room side of the counter looked like the escape scene from The Killing Fields.
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What saved the day was my colleague finding a well-run expat cafe (expat customer, not proprietor) a couple doors down from immigration -the name of the place was Good Mook. Good coffee, pate on crispy French bread, and bottles of Beer Lao… It was a great place to relax and wait for all the students to get processed, until the tiny little immigration office closed at 4:30.
We got back to our university at around 9:00 PM. By the time I had a bowl of noodles with another colleague and went home, both wife and baby were sound asleep.
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* Some of the other applicants included one of Nam’s Japanese teachers, and my next door neighbor (who also works at Nam’s school, MSU – Mahasarakham University.)
Maxie Update
We are settled into a private room at the private hospital on the street behind Serm Thai shopping center in downtown Mahasarakham. The facilities are better than the VIP room at the provincial hospital where we stayed after Max was born.
Max has an IV in his arm and he’s doing fine. He’s been fine the whole time, actually. This whole week he’s been coughing and getting stuffed up, but never stopped playing or smiling. It was heartbreaking watching him being held down by nurses and getting stuck in the arm with a needle. He cried LOUDLY and shook his head back and forth in pain and frustration. He actually pried his free arm loose of the sheet it was held under and he let loose with a massive backhand that didn’t connect with anything. He looked at me, crying, with a look of shock and incomprehension. It was… hard to watch.
But now we are settled into the room for the night and it’s all playtime and smiles again. Nam had me bring SO MUCH stuff from the house to support the little emperor’s activities here… The security guard at the front door helped me schlep some crap from my car to the room upstairs; it still took three trips, and I’m pretty much a world-class bagboy.
Anyhow. The best thing about this place is that there’s dedicated wireless on each room.
Google chat is ON, biotches.
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They are actually saying that he has pneumonia now. So this is kind of serious.
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Meanwhile, this next week is finals week and I’m writing tests in between being a boyservant and figuring out how to play Japanese children’s music from my iriver to a pair of USB-powered PC speakers. Simple willpower isn’t cutting it, so I imagine I’ll take apart the inversion pump on the wall for parts and perhaps pump out the jams via venturi effect.
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Oh something really weird happened right after my last post, at home. My desktop PC, the one I put together from parts after my White Night died a few weeks ago, well it just up and died, too. I only had a couple minutes to fiddle with it, but it seems totally fuxx0r3d. I wonder what’s up with that. My desktop PC karma is just really crap lately. Anyway, because I was scanning max’s chest x-ray right before the PC died I forgot to take it off the scanner and bring it here for the doctor to see. So after we got here and I unloaded everything from the car, I went back home to get the x-ray. Dude, the house was so empty without my wife and the Max. Damn. No way I want to stay there alone tonight! Plus, I have the boyservant role to fill.
I am being told to go buy dinner. The night market where everyone tried fried cricket and grasshoppers after our wedding 2.6 years ago is just down the street, so I’ll see what non-insect yummies are available there I guess.
Cows in my Frontyard
A continuation of the Cows in My Backyard series.
Sidenote: I’ve noticed missing graphics here and there as a result of our recent move to a new webhost. I’ll fix these soon, but in the meantime, clicking on the placeholder for a missing graphic on this site will almost always bring it up full size in a new window.
pedicheese
Beware, queasy ones.
A couple days ago Nam went to a beauty salon to get her hair done and I tagged along to get a pedicure since my toenails tend to get painful if not cut correctly, and also because pedicures are the absolute best kind of addiction in a place like Thailand – inexpensive and actually good for you.
Nam’s usual shop was closed for some reason, but since we were already out on the only sizable chunk of free time for the week, we went to another place that we’d actually been to before but didn’t like so much because the older women running it do everything very slowly. On this day, however, it was still early and their shop was empty, so we decided to give it another shot.
I sat down and got a manicure first since I had to wait for Nam anyways, and soaked my feet in a bucket of water. What happened after the manicure was simply amazing.
The old lady unwrapped a long razor blade from the piece of wax paper it came packaged in, and began shaving away the callouses on my feet – I have LOTS of callouses on my feet. In fact, the balls of my feet as well as the heels are basically huge callouses. This stems from a bad case of athlete’s foot in Japan ten years ago that opened huge cracks in the bottom of my feet over which thick layers of skin eventually accumulated. I never thought this could even be removed, actually. However, the long soak had a great effect on this chitinous mass and huge swaths of dead skin flaked off with every pass of the razor. It piled up on the wet towel draped underneath my foot like a massive pile of grated cheese. To be more specific, it was like a massive pile of fetid, extra-sharp cheddar. In hindsight, maybe I should have saved it to put on an enemy’s piece of toast.
Anyway, after she was done shaving off the pedicheese, she smoothed everything down with an oblong plastic emery board. My feet felt fantastic! It must have showed on my face, because Nam had her feet worked on too.
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* This is the first time I’ve ever seen this service performed anywhere, at any price, even though I’d heard that it existed before.
View from our stoop
In an effort to destroy the cattails, because her son is allergic to the snowy fluff it produces this time of year, the development manager instructed her minions to burn them. On a windy day. With gasoline.
Fucking oops.
Nam says that once they realized the fire was out of control and blowing towards said manager’s newly-erected wooden houses (as in, houses she built to live in herself) they called out all the workers in shouting distance to form a bucket brigade. That had no buckets.
Oops again.
Luckily, the fire eventually burnt out when the wind died down. I just I wish I could’ve been here to see it too, so I could educate the natives about a few things. Like how cattails were used by Native Americans for kindling (so maybe they should use less gasoline or something). Or by people around the world for food as well as down for stuffing. Or how cattails are being used in pilot “carbon capture” farming schemes. Then again, I probably would have just stood there laughing wickedly as the world burned just across my pond and attacked the intelligent beings who started it.
Luckily, the red-tailed pheasant-like birds seem to have returned and don’t seem to mind roosting in their newly-roasted environment. I need to get a photo of one someday I suppose…
Thailand Gas Crisis?
It’s not unusual to pull into a gas station up here in the Northeast region only to find your favorite petroleum formulation (95 benzene, 95 gasohol [E10 / E20], 91 benzene, 91 gasohol, diesel, palm diesel, B5 [5% biodiesel], LPG [Liquified Petroleum Gas], and CNG [Compressed Natural Gas], which is one of the two kinds of NGV [Natural Gas Variation]) sold out, or in the case of 95 benzene, no longer being sold at all, or in the case of LPG and especially CNG, simply not yet available.
At the PTT station in front of my university (the uni actually owns it) this morning, they were out of everything (they sell 91/95 gasohol, 91 benzene, straight-up diesel, and 5% biodiesel fomulation). There were ad hoc “sold out” signs taped to each individual pump (maybe 24 in all) and the staff were all sitting around on the pump islands. They didn’t even bother telling the cars pulling in for gas that they were out, they would just laconically point to the signs in between slacking off and playing grabass with their coworkers.
It made me wonder why they didn’t just put a big sign up at the entrance so that people didn’t pull in and waste their time, but as they say, This Is Thailand.
P.S. Until now I’ve very rarely posted negative commentary on this blog regarding my country of current residence, for one simple reason – If there’s one thing I hate it’s the recent arrivals to a country complaining about this and that and I vowed never to be one of them long ago. Having almost been here two years now though, I feel I can begin complaining with a bit of authority. ; )
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Related link: Retail oil price list from the Energy Policy & Planning Office of Thailand’s Ministry of Energy
Murasaki Inu
A lifetime ago (13 or 14 years ago to be a bit more exact) I sat in a stuffy classroom in Tenri, Japan, and started penning my first essay in Japanese. Not having yet learned any kanji, I wrote it entirely in the phonetic alphabet known as hiragana. It began something like this: One day I walked to the main worship hall and saw a purple dog…
Thus, the legend of the murasaki inu (purple dog) was born. It was a recurring theme in later essays (four years worth to be exact) as well as many blues/enka jams (anata ha tashika ni aru / watashi no murasaki inu) when Cosmic Buddha would rock abandoned parking lots, smoky music studios, and our guitarist’s cram school late at night.
Well guess what?
I saw a purple dog today. A purple dog, here in Mahasarakham, Thailand. (Nam and I were taking my mom to see the fish sanctuary, so I have witnesses.)
I don’t think it was naturally purple. It looked like purple iodine solution (used for disinfecting wounds) had been liberally applied to a shaggy white dog, but that’s not the point. It was a purple dog.
That is all.
random morlam remix
– Just because the scenery in the background looks like the kind of riverside restaurant you often see driving the highways around here. There’s nothing like the funky beat and syncopated yowling of molam to make you feel happy and at home in Isan.
Adventures in English Teaching
So you might have noticed that I don’t talk about my job here much, and there are several reasons for that. It’s mostly because I’ve read a lot of people blog about teaching and I personally found it less than enthralling, and that was before I was teaching. My not blogging about teaching definitely is not an indication that I don’t enjoy it… (After writing the previous passage, I realize that the only thing less enthralling than reading about English teaching on a blog is reading about why an English teacher who blogs doesn’t blog about work.)
Anyhow, today I had the hardest time figuring out what a student was trying to write about for an in-class assignment on what he had done for summer vacation. The words that caught my eyes on the page were “I went home and bred my niece.” Haha, I thought, and pointed out the mistake. He immediately corrected the sentence to “I went home and breed my niece.”
I told him to look up the word in the dictionary, which he did, and then turned quite red with embarrassment. Great, I thought, now I’ll finally figure out what he was trying to say. He corrected the sentence for the second time, and this time it said, “I went home and breeds my niece.” By this time I was feeling really quite sorry for his niece and decided to drop it altogether; I corrected his sentence to “I went home and took care of my niece.”
I’m still a bit unclear about what he was trying to say, though.
There – I’ve gone and blogged about English teaching, and the world might even be a bit better for it. Watch your nieces, though.