Thai Society/Culture
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Happy Thanksgiving!
… words heard from not a single student today. Surprise, surprise. I think I’ve actually seen a real live turkey here in Mahasarakham, up in the forest near the fish sanctuary, but I’m too lazy to be bothered with the killin’ and pluckin’ and dressin’ and stuffin’ and roastin’ – Thanksgiving to me is more of a “Thanksgetting.” Getting stuffed and drowsy off the tryptophan (I choose to believe in the sleepy turkey effect. Even if it’s a placebo, it still makes me feel nice, you haters.) kicks ass. Candied yams and gravy kick ass. Even cranberry sauce tends to kick some ass, in moderation. Maybe what I miss most,…
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Sunset on Nodules
Taken at the English Camp we went on a couple weeks back. (Nodules will be explained in a later post)
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Embanking
In most of the world, there is no OSHA I saw this shot when arriving to my building at school this morning. I passed by first, then turned around my car, got my camera out, then turned around again to make a second pass. It was much too far to get a clean shot drive-by style out the passenger-side window, but channel mixing in Photoshop is the impatient photographer’s lopsided wooden crutch – left in the attic until needed, and then suddenly irreplaceable.
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Natty Dread
A few months ago I wrote about the dragonfruit trees in our backyard secretly blooming at midnight. Well, these are pitaya by day: Bob must have been thinking of pitaya when he named his famous album. These are the red-fleshed variety, which only grow half as big as the white-fleshed ones. As it turns out, the universal truth about fruit (“best when fresh picked and grown organically with water buffalo cakes as fertilizer”) is especially true for pitaya: I can honestly say that the dragonfruit we grew tasted better than any I have tried until now, and I have tried many from roadside stands and markets alike. In fact, growing…
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loltokays
After looking over that last post, I just couldn’t help myself: (click on photo to open large version in pop-up)
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Wild Animal Day / Akrachat’s Most Wanted
Since we live next to a forest, we are used to seeing both wild and domesticated animals just over the wall as well as in and around the house. Out of all of the creatures that we share space with, the ones that really pose problems are: Ants, termites, mosquitoes, and the tokay lizards. The insects are a problem for obvious reasons, and the tokays (two of which I recently caught off guard long enough to photo) are actually kind of beneficial because they eat cockroaches, beetles, and other large insects, but their mating calls are loud and go on all night for about half of the year. For this…
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Curtain
We were really busy running around to our schools and searching for the perfect set of tiles in a dusty warehouse all day, so the rain was most welcome when we pulled up to a roadside stand to buy take out. We sat down as the old couple chopped veggies and ground herbs and performed frying pan magic, and witnessed a most curious phenomenon: To the left of the shop it was raining down in sheets, as if the angry monkey in the sky was throwing buckets of water down at the earth, while on the right, it was merely sprinkling. The shop seemed to be situated right on the…
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Nam Nuong
Nam Nuong are the little grilled sausages on sticks shown below, but it’s also the name of this dish. It’s Vietnamese in origin, but I don’t know what it’s called there. All of the ingredients are laid out on a rice wrapper and rolled up before eating, like a fajita. The sauce is sweet and spicy, and full of roasted peanuts – the combination of all the fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs (including lettuce, cukes, green bananas, starfruit, mint, kaffir lime leaves, green chilies, and everything else in the photo that I don’t know the names for yet) is something that cannot be described, but must be experienced.
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How I found out I’m not shaking my shoes out hard enough every morning
A heart-shaped frog procrastinated loudly when I jammed my foot in. Then, when I tried to pry him loose from the cavernous regions of the toe compartment, he secreted something slimy all over my fingertips. Maybe I shouldn’t leave my shoes outside anymore… Nature always wins in the end.
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D&D
Meet thine foe: The Giant Centipede These things just look evil, and Nam insisted I dispatch it when we found it in her university’s parking lot. “Dangerous for students walking around,” she said. I tried to kill it with a rock, but it wouldn’t die, so I pried a brick loose from a nearby footpath and ground its head into the hard-packed dirt. The whole time, my skin was crawling. This was probably the biggest one I’ve ever seen (around 8 inches long, and fatter than your finger), much bigger than the ones in Japan. Fucking nasty creatures.
