Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
I don’t remember the last time I saw this movie, but it must have been around 35 years ago… I can’t believe how good it is. This might be my favorite one-hour movie, and perhaps my favorite documentary, ever. There are just these gems of knowledge and experience spread throughout the whole voyage. Gonna watch the Hollywood remake from a few years ago next.
…and some leftover carnitas and beans, topped with fried eggs.
Max wanted curry and Mina wanted steak; necessity is the mother of noms.
I only started commonly seeing these berry-like fruits this year. They seem to be growing in popularity up here in Issan, but I suspect they were brought here from another part of Thailand, where they are apparently have shorter names: Nam daeng and nam phrong.
They are apparently used in India for pickles.
I had started calling these Lao Cherries, but there are a couple other fruits already called that (plus they don’t seem to be from this area), so I finally just looked it up.
So the important thing: Do they taste good?
They taste like vitamin C punched you in the throat. Like the sourest mango and unripe lemon (hence the name? Mamuang = mango; Manao = lemon/lime) in the world are frolicking on your tongue. So naturally, Thais eat them dipped in chili sugar and stupid farang stuff three in their mouth at a time to see if it can be done in a sort of personal stupidity challenge.
So wikicheatia has a long paragraph on names for this fruit which, in the spirit of university plagiarism, I will only only slighty modify before pasting here:
Arduina carandas
Capparis carandas
Carissa salicina
Echites spinosus
Jasminonerium carandas
Jasminonerium salicinum
karonda (Devanagari)
karamardaka (Sanskrit)
kauLi hannu(Kannada)
karavanda(Marathi)
karauna (Maithili)
vakkay (Telugu)
Canta- (Konkani)
maha karamba (Sinhala)
kilaakkaai (Tamil)
karau(n)da (unknown)
karanda (unknown)
karamda (unknown)
kerenda (in Malaya)
karaunda (Malaya/India)
Bengal currant (South India)
Christ’s thorn (South India)
nam phrom (Thailand)
namdaeng (Thailand)
caramba (Philippines)
caranda (Philippines)
caraunda (Philippines)
perunkila (Philippines)
Karja tenga (Assam)
Koromcha(Bengali)
I happened to be watching an 8mm home video of a German family visiting Pattaya in the late 70’s and spotted what could very well be my MS-60 Toyota Crown:
It seems to be the right color and model, and these cars were originally used for government bigwigs, so it’s possible that one of them parked it right in front of the Regent Hotel back then. I’m not sure of the number imported back then, but I’ve heard stories of a parking lot filled with old ones out of service. Wish I knew where it was!
Nobody is doing it better than OATS STUDIOS right now, and they are currently creating short films to see where demand lies…
Do you prefer aliens enslaving humanity and a last-ditch resistance led by Sigourney Weaver, or horrific mutant undead action in Vietnam? The latter is pretty creepy, but I could see either making it big if the effects stay on par with what they’ve created so far.
If you’re a sci-fi fan, you should check them both out.
And whoever created the prop Damasu 950 is a genius.
I guess you could call them yardlong beans, but most of the world switched to a better system long ago, and besides, where’s the fun in that?
I’ve done a clean install of WordPress because things were getting slow and I had problems using Jetpack and some outside services as well.
It was a pain in the ass, and I may change my webhost in the next month or two, but things are running a lot faster now.
This is a test. Or a pineapple pen.
Muscle-Up from Robert McIntosh on Vimeo.
