Me, the wife, the baby – we’ve all been extremely busy the whole time I haven’t been blogging. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had a gadzillion papers and tests to mark and final grades to issue, AND NOW IT’S ALL DONE!! In front of my office door, the tortured souls of those not determined enough to earn a passing grade moan and roil with much indignity. Oh wait, that’s not the sound of tortured souls, it’s just my fever hallucinations again!
Yes, I have been sleeping a lot (when not busy) trying to recover from this nasty congestive head cold thing that I even got prescribed industrial-strength pills for last week. However, the only thing that really helped was a couple nights ago when a coworker and her husband came over for a visit and she cooked up a big pot of sticky fat noodles with nuclear orange chili peppers from a market in Kalasin (a neighboring province).
I should explain here that I’ve always had a high tolerance for spicy food and enjoy feeling the heat after popping an errant chili or two… This was beyond that. After slowly chewing one, sweat was pouring from my brow and my sinuses were clear for the first time in a week… So I popped four more at once (hey, I wasn’t thinking clearly). DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER! It blew my head off andtears were pouring down my face for a few minutes…. But my sinuses were clear for a full 24 hours!
I woke up this morning again a little congested, but I don’t know if I can face those fiery orange hell peppers again… I can honestly say that eating them is a life-changing experience. Anyone wanna try?
Category: Thai Society/Culture
git up a git git down 911 119 191 is a joke in yo town
It made so much sense when I found out in Japan that the number for the popo fire department was 119, because like so many other aspects of Japanese culture, it was the exact opposite of what I was used to. Namely, 911. But it is kind of strange that Thailand has taken the only unique left in that series and dubbed 191 the number for emergency services countrywide.
So the real question is, why don’t they standardize the number for emergency services worldwide?
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Flava Flav says “Ho!”
Climbing Motorcycle Show @ Red Cross Fair
What is the Red Cross Fair?
Every year in February, for Chinese New Years, the downtown area of Mahasarakham (Maha Sarakham) around the clock tower is swarmed by vendors and street sellers of every kind of unsanitary food and useless street fair item imaginable. Entire avenues are blocked off for a few weeks, both officially, with rolling steel roadblocks, and unofficially, with sheer human mass. This is the Northeast Thai version of Carnival, sans dancing or fucking in the street, since that would take entirely too much energy (this is the tropics, after all). Somewhere at the center of activity is the real fairground area complete with rickety-ass fair rides of death, rigged game booths, sideshows with brightly illustrated signs ten times more interesting than what’s inside, and even more of the same unsanitary food stalls and useless crap-sellers. In a word, heaven. But to be a bit more honest, it’s just like a fair back home after all is said and done. Except for the motorcycle show.
I saw the “climbing motorcycle show” last year and regretted not having a video camera at the time. The rider was the craziest guy I’ve ever seen, pulling stunts I’d never even imagined. I won’t even try to describe them. Suffice to say, they were some of the most amazing riding tricks I’ve ever seen – in person, on TV, on the net, EVER.
When the Red Cross fair rolled around this year, I knew I had to get it on film. Unfortunately, it seems that they’ve cleaned the show up a bit; it didn’t have the same impact it had last year, and the rider was different this year. It’s of course possible that it was just his day off, but I prefer to believe that he died in a blaze of glory, trying to pull an inverted somersault while doing his stuff.
They’ve added a car to the show (a Nissan NV) this year and have given the children active roles in it. This is pure hubris, and one can only hope the gods turn a blind eye. Anyhow, without further ado:
Upside down in the Third World…
…or is it the First World that’s fucked?
First check out this article:
The Bacon-Wrapped Hot Dog: So Good It’s Illegal
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Now, which of the following do you think is harder for me to explain to a classroom full of average Thai kids?
- Why it’s illegal (and a jailable offense) to sell grilled hot dogs where I’m from
- Why street vendors where I’m from have to watch out for cops, health and safety officials and extortionate gangs
- Why any of the above parties can’t be universally placated with a free meal now and then
If they outlawed (and enforced) hot dog grilling in Bangkok alone, 20,000 people would have to change careers. Luckily, most of the changing would be done by just selling different stuff on the cart the next day, but still…
Cows in My New Backyard
Well, more of the empty lot next door than our backyard, but hey, the important thing here is the cows, right?
If you’ve stuck around this blog since I made my move to Maha Sarakham, Thailand, you know that I’m somewhat obsessed with the flora and fauna surrounding me (whether I end up eating it or not), and I hope for the Cows in My Backyard series to become something of a time-honored tradition. So far, it’s only been a year or so. Here’s to more cows, and maybe even more backyards in the future.
Pumpkin Top Security
I love companies that don’t take themselves too seriously; especially ones that should. Then again, maybe the Pumpkins are old money aristocrat types convinced that their family crest strikes fear in the hearts of would be wrongdoers (fuck thee not with the PUMPKINS, knave!).
Homely
We put in curtains (cream) and grass (green) today. It’s amazing how much more this house feels like home now.
As a side note, there’s a dirt track to the rear of our house where dump trucks come to drop fill dirt at the back end of the development. I took the Crown back there today to drop off 16 bags of black loam I bought (20 Baht/bag) to lay under the grass. After throwing the bags of loam over our fence, I got back in the car and did donuts and long drifts in the dirt all the way back to the paved road. All of the laborers working on various houses pumped their fists in the air and shouted Thai arribas. I’ve changed back to 15″ wheels because I didn’t have money to buy new tires for the 17″ rims and I got tired of changing flats every other day. I know, poor white collar me. Next thing you know I’ll be drilling holes in my muffler instead of getting it done properly.
hooked up
Got my DSL hookup at the new house – currently 256/128k or some such sadness, but it’s a lot better than nothing, and I’ll be upgrading to 1Mb/512k on Monday. I think I may even bother to bring the DL speed to 1.5M for another 110 Baht/month. Thinking about the hikari line I gave up in Japan sometimes makes me sad, but I find comfort in the Apocalypse coming and killing everybody with faster connections than me (most of the developed world).
As a side note, this morning at first I could not get the Crown into gear but somehow squeezed it into second while starting at the same time, and drove it all the way to a garage without depressing the clutch. I borrowed my sister in law’s new Chevy Aveo because we are getting the Cefiro resprayed (almost for free with 1st class insurance – we only pay 4,000 Baht). They replaced a clutch cylinder part on the Crown and I just picked it up – 600 Baht, all inclusive. I love Thailand.
toluene dreams
So we spent all day cleaning up the new house, something I swore we wouldn’t have to do because labor is so cheap here. As it turns out, the problem isn’t getting people to do menial tasks cheaply (we borrowed some workers from our housing developer for free, even). The problem is getting people to do menial tasks with any degree of proficiency (none) or to the hirer’s satisfaction (ditto). So I spent the whole day painting over stains, removing sprayed furniture glue from our floor tiles with paint thinner, developing new and exciting ways of removing mysterious black stains from our bathroom wall tiles (nylon brush + concentrated dish soap + industrial strength elbow grease). I’d like to say I got really high off the paint thinner, but all I really got was a stinging, burning sensation.on my hands after a couple hours. It brought back memories of helping my parents remodel our Fountain Valley house.
Tomorrow, we pack up and start moving.