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 up (none did, luckily).
(My mom came out all the way from the states yesterday to stay with us and the baby for a month and a half.)
(We have a new nanny, who just started coming over last week.)
So we had to leave the baby at home all day with my mom who speaks no Thai and our nanny who speaks no English, and it was the longest time Nam has ever spent away from the baby. So you can probably guess the recurring topic of conversation in the car, three hours there and three hours back.
Of course, we got back home and everything was fine. Mom is still mom, nanny is still nanny, and baby is still unconcerned about the rising price of oil, so all is well.
Category: Thai Society/Culture
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 barbecue array – as cheaply as possible. Maybe I’ll attempt an Archimedes’ death ray out of bits of broken mirror.
hisashiburi no kabe
So in Japan-speak, a bunch of us ran headfirst into a cultural wall yesterday, and it was a rather bracing slap in the face after having conquered so many other challenges in the semi-distant past…
We went to the sports college next to my university, most famous for being the alma mater of the “Jackie Chan of Thailand” (Tony Jaa), in order to start a thrice-weekly regimen of swimming in their Olympic-sized pool. So we paid 40 Baht (adult price, about $1.20) admission fee, and were promptly rejected entry int o the pool for “not wearing swimming suits.” But the thing is, we were wearing swimming suits. So it ended up being a huge argument with us on one side showing mesh liners and insisting that these were, indeed, pieces of swimwear, and some hick-ass PE teacher on the the other side insisting that they were not (I’m convinced this backward inaka motherfucker thinks that mesh liners are just built-in underwear.).
Anyways.
We fought the law, and the law declared that only skin-tight swimsuits are suitable for use in this particular pool, i.e., the law won. Fags. What kind of sickos want to see my fat ass in a speedo, anyway?
P.S. I must admit it feels kind of dirty cursing on the same page I post the baby’s photos. I guess I’ll just have to pretend he isn’t looking at me.
Real life neko bus
craigslist rocks. One of the things I miss most about Japan is Yahoo auctions. Thailand, or for that matter, most of the rest of the world simply has too fiendish a mentality for any kind of shopping/auction system employing the honor system to work.
Water in the damn line again
If they ever get around to making a hermetically sealed telephone line in Thailand, I might have a decent net connection. My line is down again, or perhaps waterlogged as the telephone monopoly keeps telling me. I’m not desperate enough to be online to go to net cafes or anything, but I may check on email every few days when I happen by an open hotspot. Dammit.
Let’s Have Our Piece of Third World Cake! (and eat it, too!)
Third World Cake(TM) Checklist:
- Pseudo-trademarked jelly/frosting entities (Mykkie and Myni) – check!
- Indestructible sugar frosting – checkcheck!
- Red jelly blobs in place of actual fake cherries – checkcheckcheck!
It was kind of a celebration for Max’s 2nd week of life outside of mommy – and the underlying chocolate spongecake was actually pretty good, and not overly sweet like 99% of sweets here.
Thai ATM Horror Story
So today turned out to be a big bummer because of the stupid Thai banking system. In short, I tried to withdraw 20,000 Baht from my Japanese bank with an international (PLUS system) bank card, which is something I’ve done many times before with no real problems. This time, however, the ATM (Thai Commercial Bank) flashed an error, “Communication Error,” and spat out my card but no cash and no receipt. I figured it might be an error with this particular bank and mine in Japan (Mitsui Sumitomo), so I tried again with the ATM to the immediate right of the first one (Thai Military Bank). Same error message, same exact result: No cash, no receipt.
Then I figured I’d try a little bit later so I pulled up to a Krung Thai Bank ATM at a gas station and tried again to withdraw 20,000 Baht. This time I got an “insufficient balance” error, and a sinking feeling in my stomach (and again, no cash and no receipt). Sure enough, when I rushed home to look at my balance online, it showed that 20,000 Baht had been withdrawn today.
I immediately called my bank in Japan and explained the situation. The man on the other end was sympathetic and said I needed to talk to the banks here in Thailand first, but that if nothing could be done on this side, he could probably launch an investigation into the matter which would take weeks to find anything (if at all), but sounded much better than nothing. At this point, I was pretty sure that appealing to the banks here would end in squat.
Sure enough, both Thai banks claimed since I wasn’t sure which bank had actually made the transaction, it absolved them both of responsibility until I found out this info from my Japanese bank. Of course, by the time I received this happy reply (via Nam, who went to go find the contact info on the ATMs while I watched sleeping baby at home), my bank in Japan had already closed for the day.
So.
20,000 Baht (68,000 yen or around $600) just disappeared into the ether, and, as of now, I have fuck all to show that this is what actually happened.
My question: At times like this is it more appropriate to hate computers, the third world, or banks in general?
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UPDATE: I called my bank in Japan to tell them that the Thai banks are not accepting responsibility (big surprise!) since I don’t know which one caused the problem, and they insist that the Japan side must initiate action of some kind. The guy at my bank who is following the case advised me to wait seven working days to see if the problem is corrected automatically, then to contact him again so he can initiate an inquiry which may take a couple months to finish. This blows.
Contender for Best Brand Name of All Time
See? The baby really is lucky! I went to buy a case of water at a farmer’s wholesale mart and stumbled onto the grand mother of unfortunate branding – Golden Shower Brand Sugar!
“For the perverted diabetic in you!”
I just appreciate that they seemingly got the trademark (TM) – then again, in most parts of Asia, sometimes a marking is just a marking so – maybe they just claim to have the trademark. It’s time for someone to jump on this opportunity; the Golden Shower name must expand across cultural boundaries and product lines alike!
Scenes from a University Van
From our road trip to Pattaya a couple weeks ago.
If you love frogs, you probably shouldn’t read the latter half of this post, but I’m not hiding it in the extended entry, either. Do or do not, there is no try, as it were.
(as always, click on any photo to open a larger version in a pop-up window)
This post goes out to my brother Adam, who definitely might be man enough to eat skewered frogs after a few beers (although we did it sober here). The one I pulled apart in the tissue shown above was pregnant, so the blurry black and white dots are eggs. Actually, the pregnant frogs were more expensive than the non-preggers (30 Baht/stick vs. 20 Baht/stick).
I’m going to preempt any “the trees are screaming” complaints at this time by pointing out that this is normal fare for hunters and gatherers, which many of the indigents here are.
I will also go on record that these frogs do not taste like chicken. They do not taste too bad, though… That is, they don’t really taste of anything, really – it tastes like you are eating a rich, fatty protein, if that makes any sense. Maybe like a roasted shishamo, but not as delicious. I will admit that it took a bit of courage to eat one. After all, it was the same kind of frog I found in my shoe a while ago (called un-an in Thai).
F*ck Songkran
So we’re in the middle of the Songkran holiday period that marks the Thai New Year. The reason I feel so strongly about this holiday, which is also called the “water festival” in English, is that in typical third-world fashion, safety is being totally sacrificed for alcohol-fueled shits ‘n giggles.
Apparently the current state of affairs is a perversion of the old tradition of pouring water over the hands of elders to wash away bad luck (just as we experienced during our wedding here). What I mean by “current state of affairs” is roads lined with drunken idiots (and all of their children, brothers, and sisters, also drunk) who throw water, talcum powder, and sometimes ice at passing vehicles and unfortunate pedestrians. Of course, the other half of this is roving pickups (remember 2/3 of the cars in this regions are pick-ups) loaded with passengers and tubs of water stopping suddenly for water fights. Motorbikes seem to be everyone’s favorite target, so they swerve suddenly to avoid getting drenched. Hell, I myself almost took out a couple dumbasses on the highway driving back from Khon Kaen a few days ago, and the holiday hadn’t even officially started yet! Anyways, that’s why we have a death toll of 180 and 2,500 reported accidents a few days into the celebrations: Drunk idiots on the street and in moving vehicles.
I guess another way to see this is from the Darwinistic perspective – wankers will be wankers, and some unlucky wankers die wanking. If it weren’t for all of the children being injured and killed every year due to their idiotic parents and friends, maybe Songkran wouldn’t so bad after all.