Thai Society/Culture
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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90-day report
Pretty much every foreigner in Thailand on a non-immigrant visa is supposed to report into immigration every 90 days. This may be in the form of a letter, except if the immigration officer tells you to report in person (or send a representative from your organization in). Of course, all the teachers at our school got stuck with the latter method, and the girl who usually goes in for us (we have to report to immigration in Nong Khai, on the border with Laos) was busy, so a coworker and I went in a university car. Nam also came along with us to help clear any snags that might come…
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Solar-barbecued chicken
This sounds interesting. As a sidenote, Thailand is more “green” in some ways than first world countries. For instance, they sell B5 diesel here at major gas station chains – B5 is 5% biodiesel. And Hi-octane gasoline (95) is all but gone around these parts, supplanted by its E20 (20% methanol) equivalent. Whether this is truly better for the planet in the long run or not is up for debate. It sure isn’t better for some older cars! I met a fellow who has made a small-scale biodiesel production facility in his garage; this is an area I am interested in. I also want to try building a solar chicken…
