Thai Society/Culture
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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!
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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,…
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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…
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Captain Ahab: The Man Who Brought Us Lizard Salad
Yesterday provided a chance encounter with a local character which has forever changed our culinary lives. WE HAVE EATEN LIZARD, SOME KIND OF IGUANA. Specifically, this kind of iguana, although it might have been a blue-colored one since those are apparently bigger and tastier. There are so many things I want to say about this experience, it’s all just a jumble in my mind right now… I think I’ll tackle the explanation chronologically. So yesterday, Nam and I were in front of our house taking photos. I set up a tripod in front of the pond and we started taking a long series of shots in the hot sun. Along…
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Isan News Update
It has been raining the past week, which is a rather curious development for this area this time of year. In fact, there was a pretty serious storm a couple nights ago and it rained fairly hard last night as well. The huge tract of land (future housing lots) behind our house has been filled in with shallow ponds (kind of returning it to its natural status of swamp, except elevated a couple meters with fill dirt), from which many noisy amphibians have emerged. This sudden spate of precipitation is in stark contrast to the first year I lived here, when I saw no real rain from October 2006 all…
