Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
Had some nice sandwiches at a new café called Nick on Soi Ruamrudee. Very chill place with excellent ingredients and no fear of salt.
Nam’s could have been better with feta cubes instead of tofu, but it was still pretty good!
Nick on Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/PQmjByBNwtUHsUfv8
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 one office, demanding that I provide a detailed answer to every request, and then almost immediately afterwards another form from the other office, with significantly different and sometimes contradictory requests. I try to explain the situation and provide the correct answer, but it doesn’t seem to help.
If you learn nothing else, learn that there are always people doing cooler things than you.
Nam and I took a nice trip to Bangkok over the weekend to pick up my new ride. Her older sister, Nok, made the purchase and handled all the transfer paperwork before we got there.
More to follow.
I wonder how long it will take my students to figure out that they can use this for my online Public Speaking courses… I’ve already been asked to check papers written with ChatGPT, so this is just a natural progression. Still, I sometimes feel this year’s AI enthusiasm is just the evolved NFT fcukery of yesteryear.
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.
Come on, this guy’s practically a national treasure!
Afroman Got Raided by Cops, So He Put Them in His Music Video
