Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
This was taken last week at Rajabhat Maha Sarakham, my university, at a welcoming ceremony for freshmen (aka “freshies” in Thailand). In the foreground, English program students are praying during a traditional bai sri ceremony around a Christmas tree-shaped arrangement of folded banana leaves, as other students play takraew on the courts in the background and molam blasts from the unseen stage to the left.
This was waiting for an engine swap at my mechanic’s shop yesterday. I vote for a supercharged V8 diesel for a balance between economy and kicking ass.
April, May, and June are mango season here. Everybody who grows them at home brings them into the office or to their friends before the fruit gets too ripe. The coolest thing is that there are over a hundred different species grown and sold here in Thailand. I’ve probably tried about a third of them. To date, the best kind I’ve had are small ones that people grow in their backyards and sell at weekend fresh markets, known generically as mamuang noi (small mango). They have the perfect blend of sweet, tart, and wild flavors, and are at once slightly chewy yet soft.
And I thought Max’s coining of the term, “unko hot dog” was genius… This takes it to a whole new level.
“The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the somtam.”
If I weren’t such a well-tempered and patient individual, I’d have maimed several people this week.
I got so absorbed in this, it took me a few seconds to realize that Max was repeatedly kicking me in the groin to get my attention: http://wheelsofsteel.net/
When I ventured out this morning to buy the kid’s breakfast, sticky rice and barbecued pork skewers (which have gone up in price universally to 5 baht per skewer — they were still 3 baht at some places up until a couple months ago), I drove though a fog hovering in the neighborhood behind ours. Even with the windows closed, I got a whiff of Raid and realized they were fumigating the area again. I hurriedly went to buy the food — in an yet unsprayed area — and rushed back home.
Nam said she’d just heard a pickup driving around blasting a message from the local government, so that meant they were coming to spray at our house, too. It was just past 7:30, about an hour before we usually take Max to school near our house, and Mina to her school near Nam’s university. But the spray man was coming, so we had to get them out. I got them dressed while Nam packed their bags, then I got them in the car and strapped them in their seats. I got the car running and pulled it out onto the street in front of the house, pointed away from the direction they were coming. Nam came running out with the bags, got in the car and pulled away… I stood there watching them leave in my boxers, and exactly one minute later heard the sound of insect doom:
The Kodak DC120 was the first megapixel camera I owned. I got it back in 1998 or so and maybe sprung for an enormous 4Mb compact flash card as well, to add to the industry-leading 2Mb internal memory in the camera (enough to store 2 whole photos in RAW mode, but they didn’t call it RAW yet, it was simply described as uncompressed).
After I posted about the iPad 2 yesterday and decided against pitting its hapless camera against the one on my phone, I realized that I might have photos in my archives with which the iPad2’s test photo could be compared. My digicam archives go back to 1998, spanning those years with shots from different models of Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Sony, Ricoh, Sanyo, Kyocera, Panasonic, Fuji, Casio, Toshiba, Leica (!!), and numerous spotty models of indeterminate Chinese/Taiwanese/Korean manufacture (I even have shots from a camera that apparently embedded a paid porn site URL in the EXIF data — can’t figure out who’s camera it was, though). All of these cameras proved to be more capable than the iPad 2’s camera(s). Finally, browsing through some shots with the Kodak DC120 that Nam took in Yasothon Province, Thailand, during the annual banfai rocket festival, back in 1999, I found some comparable shots taken on an overcast day. Here’s one:
The iPad 2 photos from yesterday’s post:
Aside from the lighting, I think the state of the art digital camera from 1997 actually stands up fairly well with the best-selling tablet computer* of today.