Thai Society/Culture
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Paneer Chili at Bombay 101
We hadn’t been there since it opened, and the food was much improved: Bombay Indian Cuisine Roi Et
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Roi Et Street Art
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Songthaew vs Tesla
Related Newsflare from Feb: Tesla ‘bug’ causes car to brake when it sees ‘people standing on back of bus’
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Chicano Subculture in Thailand and Japan
There was a resurgence of interest in “Thai Chicanos” last year, resulting in a few articles and videos across the web. The most entertaining video, however, is the one from almost a decade ago, about the “Cholos of Bangkok,” by Coconuts TV. Also last year, an interesting YouTube video documenting “Japan’s Chicano Culture In LA” was published by Peter Santenello: However, the true counterpart to the “Cholos of Bangkok” is “Inside Japan’s Chicano Subculture” by the NYT: From a language and culture standpoint, all of these are enthralling. I’ve watched them all multiple times and pick up on new details every time.
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Blue vs Red Kapom/Gapom Species
No photos here, just a link to a 13 year old post I updated about some local lizard species which are called the same thing in Thai/Isan languages: กะปอม/กิ้งก่า), but ended up being distinct species with different common names: Oriental garden lizard (Calotes versicolor) vs. Calotes mystaceus (the Indo-Chinese forest lizard). For the sake of posterity, I hereby shorten their names to Bob(s) and Dan(s). Bobs are the red ones, Dans are the blue ones (did you know that roughly 75% of people on social media would have used apostrophes to indicate plurality in that sentence?) Update: Uh oh, there are Emmas (green when mating) in Thailand as well: Calotes…
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Paperwork Crossfire
Having lived and worked at a large company in Japan for over a decade, I got used to dealing with red tape, idiot bureaucracy, and daunting stacks of interoffice paperwork and documentation. When I moved to Thailand to live a “simpler” life, it never occurred to me that I might find a tangled mess of paperwork to rival that of any developed country. However, today I find myself in the crossfire of two separate government offices that simply cannot agree with each other and hope to silence the other by firing enormous salvos of paperwork at each other. It seems like every other day I’m getting a new form from…
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Jui Juis – จอมโจรขโมยใจ (Chom Chon Khamoi Jai)
One of my favorite Thai Indy bands, even though I only have one… Juijui took the iku iku iku / itai itai itai jokes of the pre K-pop peak to the next level; homeboy was basically a genius who could be very cringe, as my kids would say. This one is pretty amazing for a guy who doesn’t seem to have studied Japanese very much.
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Surviving the Great Floods of 2022 in NE Thailand (Part 1)
It’s been six weeks since my last post… On October 5th, at around 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon, I wrote about how the whole country was flooding from heavy rains of the past week and how our neighborhood usually floods, but that this time the drainage systems in our area were working really well. Later that evening, Nam and I gathered shovels and twine and started helping people from the neighborhood fill sandbags just down our street in an effort to block off rising waters from the rear of our estate, where there’s marshland on an open property. Our entire housing estate (which has expanded greatly since we built our…
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Highway rest stops in Thailand
Coming from Japan to Thailand 15 years ago, the state of the roads here was lamentable, and many of the streets/rural highways in the Issan region and around our city weren’t even paved – or had big enough holes to break wheels and axles, a common sight back then. I used to go on university trips every term and we would often take the uni bus or minivans on long road trips, ostensibly for work, but more just to get out and travel. This was always a nice perk for government university work, because we could often take the whole family, as well. It also made me very aware of…
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Thai Seafood Lunch
Just a short clip of lunch in Prachuap Kiri Khan province on our recent trip. Shot on a Osmo Pocket my trusty Poco F1, the best smartphone of its time (3+ years ago and will either be replaced by an F3 or the impending F4). Photos to follow. Map link: ป้าเอื้องป้าอิ้ง Pa Aung Pa Aing Thai Restaurant
