Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
The Kujira Crown has a mysterious problem with its plug contacts corroding at a high rate – enough to affect performance after just two or three weeks. I originally thought it could be fixed by using colder plugs, but that hasn’t helped at all. As it turns out it doesn’t seem to be caused by […]
Yesterday I got food poisoning for the first time in a couple years; it was probably a bad spot of ground pork or chicken I had for breakfast. I started feeling queasy in the late morning and had Nam pick me up after she picked up Max from a half-day at nursery school (we’re sharing […]
Pushing a 225 50 R17 (this set of mags was once on daddy’s Crown, but they scraped the wheelwells on even small bumps and made manual steering very heavy!).
The crown princess is coming to Rajabhat Mahasarakham University for some kind of contest to be held at our new indoor event hall. This means I saw the first helicopter since the last time a member of the royal family came (last year, when another princess landed on our track to be taken by motorcade […]
A few weeks ago we decided to go out for a drive. It was time to take Max for his first visit to the monkey park in the nearby town of Kosum Phisai, so we put his car seat in the trusty old Kujira and were on our way. We took the Kujira instead of […]
I just happened to be looking at Thai used car sites for some missing pieces to the Crown, and I happened upon one of the riciest piece of riceriffic gohan I’ve ever seen (can you say bad aero kit?). It’s apparently a Crown one year older than mine, which puts it in an earlier series. […]
After having the baby, I ran out of money to complete my list of thing to do with the Kujira Crown. Since I reverted to stock tires I alleviated bottoming out problems and can hence wait on any suspension upgrades. She needs to be stripped and repainted, though, before the rust gets too bad. I […]
Nam and I ran a bunch of errands today and saw three very rare things: At the body shop: A Kujira Crown almost just like mine, but in much better condition (original everything: 4 cylinder engine, chrome trim [sob], automatic shifter on steering column indicating the car’s original purpose as a taxi in Japan [moving […]
Just thought I’d amend my statement from the other day: NOBODY WALKS IN THAILAND –> THAIS GENERALLY AVOID WALKING AT ALL COST Because, obviously, I am in Thailand, and I am walking. Also, the only other guy I saw walking on my way home today was an illegal Shan. I usually walk home from my […]
As promised, here’s the whole story: On the second day of the new year, our nanny invited us to her village for the bi-annual emptying of a communal fishpond. We piled into our trusty ’71 Crown, picked up a Japanese teacher who wanted to experience village life, and headed out deep into the rice fields. […]