Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
We just came back from a back-to-back four day trip to Pattaya and 8 day trip to Japan. I will try and document some of it here. The Pattaya trip was a 40-person corporate trip for my cousin’s company in Japan that Nam and I organized; it turned out well. It all started out with a double-decker bus we chartered to pick up the group at BKK. It was a pretty awesome setup and the driver, Noi, was very cool.
A student told me it was hot like the hell the other day, and I’m not inclined to disagree. The temp is reaching 43°C (109.4°F) pretty much all week, and we just hide from the sun all day, be it at home or at the nearby mall, or somewhere with good AC. I still walk every day at dusk, and I long for even slightly cooler days.
These were taken back in November of last year. This is actually a flooded parking lot (the water was about a foot deep) that has been completely dry for the past few months. It is extremely dry this year, and hotter than usual. The only saving grace is a strong breeze that kicks up for hours at a time, which has an effect like a convection oven during the hot afternoons, but it’s better than that clingy hot and humid feeling like Japanese summers.
Saw this girl being transported to school a while back
I still see something new every day up here.
Mina and I saw this place from the mall across the street and wanted to go thrifting. After talking about it in the mall for a couple hours, she looked it up and it turned out to be a bar, which was pretty disappointing. In retrospect, the RED HOT POLE DANCE STRIPPER advertised in the window may have been a clue.
This is a solar-lighted walking path at my university. I’m very happy they renewed them, since the old ones were not lighted and were a constant tetanus hazard, but, this type of shoddiness really bothers me. I’m pretty sure they will wither leave it as is or attempt a cosmetic fix, but I will check again soon to see if they’ve done anything.
The reason this bothers me is that I’ve seen the result of an improperly support column coming loose from its anchors. It killed some unlucky guy buying groceries and injured several others at a covered market right near our house, during a fierce windstorm. The support columns were pulled completely out by the wind, and the roof they supported acted as a sail and carried the entire steel and plexiglass structure into the adjacent highway. The structure was actually shaped just like this – just a long roof supported on one side, but on a much larger scale.
Thai meatballs (luk chin or look chin, depending on your preferred Romanization) are, like sausage, popular and of mysterious formulation — you never really know what they’re made of, even after eating them. More important, however, is the dipping sauce. Good dipping sauce has saved many a bad meatball, and sauce is actually one of the most important aspects of Thai culture.
If you know, you know.
Seeing this made me want to watch True Detective S1 again.
True Detective set in rural Thailand would have the perfect atmosphere.
If I had to describe it in two words, I might say “peppery” and “fishy” – which is strange, because I hate most fishy things. For some reason, it really works with this soup, although not everywhere makes it fishy. This soup is a bit rare and old school, but I’ve found it’s an excellent indicator that you should try other less common dishes on the menu if it’s good. Places that don’t have fresh ingredients all the time won’t bother to make this.
And for some reason, in most of Asia, the common word for spigot seems to be, “cock.”
