tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-210262962008-05-07T19:34:05.615-04:00Bnoreply@blogger.comBlogger74125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-63089820274165273872008-02-09T14:35:00.000-05:002008-02-09T14:41:05.795-05:00

After two years in this wonderful country, we are reluctantly leaving Thailand and returning to the US. Avid readers of this blog may remember an entry made over a year and a half ago concerning my fourteen-foot fall through a roof to a concrete floor below. The three of you will recall my sheer joy over having miraculously survived it and the conviction that I would eventually enjoy a total

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-56260198839643179122007-12-10T12:39:00.000-05:002007-12-11T14:50:11.989-05:00

It’s the small things. After spending years of hammering large things into bits of useless notions – pitch pots and yarn-wrapped coffee can projects a third grade teacher assured would please Mommy – the meanings and misunderstandings of life – obsessions with dissecting self and other’s motivations – drawings, paintings and words hopelessly looking for colors that might communicate something,

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-9990516134222460062007-10-21T20:43:00.000-04:002007-10-21T21:25:42.292-04:00

The above photo is from a BBC news website reporting how a group of rhesus macaques killed Delhi's Deputy Mayor yesterday. There also have been numerous cases of these monkeys biting and harassing visitors to the Krabi Tiger Cave Temple, which A recently visited. It is wise to be super wary of these cute and charming monkeys. We are edging them out of their habitat and they are doing what

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-79462497892638142007-10-18T04:01:00.000-04:002007-10-18T05:44:14.344-04:00

We deal with the discomfort of our awareness of our mortality in a variety of ways. Divergent religions and cultures provide an assortment of rites designed to honor the deceased and help to acknowledge the inevitability of death. Religious ceremonies, while dissimilar in appearance, all share a basic ingredient; the hope of an afterlife and the continuation of our id. The Mexican culture

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-8503762747122568082007-10-15T12:29:00.000-04:002007-10-21T06:41:27.450-04:00

One encounters unusual road traffic when you head north from Phuket. A’s recent trip to Krabi with our friend, Pim, began with a stop at the Tiger Cave Temple, also known as Wat Tham Sua. It is one of the most famous temples in southern Thailand. The monks live in a jungle valley contained by a warren of natural caves and share their habitat with numerous monkeys. The temple teaches Vipassana

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-88028373000751779262007-10-13T23:29:00.000-04:002007-10-16T23:33:53.899-04:00

(Photo of Jim Howe taken by jazz vocalist, Diane Linscott, at a session last Monday.) I unexpectedly and prematurely lost a wonderful friend Friday and the world lost an incredible jazz bassist. Jim Howe's personality brought laughter and joy to everyone, but especially to the musicians he played with. He played with many of the greats and was a tireless promoter of jazz. He was a musician's

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-91003564478178415742007-10-11T06:13:00.000-04:002007-10-15T12:29:50.099-04:00

Thousands of people gathered at Chinese shrines around Phuket yesterday to participate in pole-raising ceremonies before for the Vegetarian Festival, which began today. Tall bamboo poles were raised at the auspicious time of 5.09 pm. Nine is the most auspicious number throughout Thailand. (Five is an auspicious number for people with day jobs.) The poles' function is to join the physical and

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-62097336434290625502007-10-10T11:15:00.000-04:002007-10-11T12:53:48.086-04:00

A is on a four-day trip to Krabi to the home of one of our Thai friends, Pim. Krabi is a province north of here. She's excited about it. It will involve a Thai country wedding, with all its bright colors and traditional music and she's sure to bring back great pictures. It's the real-deal Thailand and hardly resembles this Acapulco-like, tourist haven. Going north to anyplace other than Bangkok

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-47112760563477639622007-09-08T12:16:00.000-04:002007-10-11T05:39:41.657-04:00

I am recovering from the nasty tropical disease, dengue fever. It is transmitted by the aedes aegypti mosquito pictured above. This island is home to a great variety of mosquitoes. There are more than 2,500 species of mosquitoes. 2,449 of them live here. Some are so small you can hardly see them and others are big enough to suck a small dog down to a pelt filled with dry bones; and there

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-43361298355587852772007-08-21T07:15:00.000-04:002007-10-11T00:51:53.296-04:00

I have information for sale and I think it's worth a helluva lot of money to Israel, or the Holocaust Museum, or Schwabbel's Haberdashery on 37th Street. I've found Menegele's daughter! She started a root canal on me yesterday afternoon. The circumstances leading me to her began commonly enough. I've been getting crowns installed on a few teeth. I couldn't sleep Friday night because

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-81022067708024914122007-07-05T16:58:00.000-04:002007-07-06T00:58:49.001-04:00

The grammar of the Thai language is considerably simpler than Western languages. Words are not modified or conjugated for tenses, plurals, genders, or subject-verb agreement. Articles such as "a", "an", or "the" are also not used. Tenses, levels of politeness, verb-to-noun conversion, and other language concepts are accomplished with the simple addition of various modifying words to the basic

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-12344582377435907792007-07-02T12:19:00.000-04:002007-10-10T23:55:57.318-04:00

The expatriate exercise is littered with land mines. I suspect that every expatriate, regardless of the country he’s come from or landed in, eventually realizes that he will only superficially adapt to the society he has chosen to adopt. Even if he could somehow waltz past the physical appearance and language hazards, the powers of ancient cultural subtleties blow him away bit by mysterious

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-66376755473040791082007-06-30T16:26:00.000-04:002007-10-10T23:56:34.596-04:00

I rotate with Earth at 1,038 miles per hour (at the equator), orbit around the Sun at 18.5 miles per second, rotate around the center of the Milky Way at about 150 miles per second, and move through space with our galaxy at some thousands of miles per second. And here I’ve been blaming the heat, humidity, insane traffic and disorienting Thai customs for my dizzy spells. I simply must find a

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-78134977154516734522007-05-01T10:15:00.000-04:002007-10-10T23:57:17.989-04:00

This lovely Thai woman transliterates her nickname into English as ‘Ooy.’ Ooy is the bar supervisor at Baan Rim Pa, Phuket’s most touted restaurant. In that setting, she is a model of sophistication and efficiency. Few customers would guess that Ooy is a country girl from Isan in northern Thailand, with deep roots in a rural culture that has remained pretty much the same for eons. I’ve known

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-28995120406064628682007-04-30T18:57:00.000-04:002007-10-10T23:58:04.545-04:00

Respect for elders is still very much intact in Thailand, as it is in many poor countries. There is some sense to it. One doesn't have to be necessarily wise or clever to achieve a modicum of longevity in a land of plenty, but it takes some doing to reach old age in a meager economy fraught with hazards and sparse medical care. Elders, especially in the rural reaches of Thailand, receive

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-48847853872095897802007-04-30T18:17:00.000-04:002007-10-10T23:58:52.987-04:00

Silk production today is a highly automated industry. That is; except for the cocooning chores of a Mulberry-feeding moth. ‘Silkworm’ is a misnomer because the creatures that do the spinning are actually caterpillars called Bombyz Mori – not worms at all. A got to see Thai silk production up close during her recent trip to Isan and nothing about it was automated. Everything from boiling the

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-33596579393060957142007-02-28T05:10:00.000-05:002007-10-10T23:59:40.807-04:00

Thailand is a favorite destination for men looking for sex change operations. Thai males, because of their small size and somewhat delicate features, seem to be easily transformed into very beautiful women - some of them are stunningly beautiful and can easily fool the most discerning heterosexual's roaming eye. Phuket boasts a theatrical setting with an elaborate trans gender review that

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-26165395153057179762007-02-26T10:53:00.000-05:002007-10-11T00:00:44.466-04:00

We’ve enjoyed two sets of visitors over the last month – friends and relatives who filled our digs with the scent of homeland. We were somewhat apprehensive before they arrived. Thailand is not for everyone and many amenities taken for granted in the US are missing. The Thai toilet experience bears little resemblance to genteel ablutions in American bathrooms and the humidity can bear down on

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-91498594612182588022007-02-26T09:12:00.000-05:002007-02-26T23:30:50.329-05:00

Valentine’s Day is a happy occasion in Thailand. This is the second one we’ve celebrated here together. Thais love Valentine’s Day and make a rather big deal of it. It’s likely that most of them don’t realize the day began in honor of a Christian saint. There are varying opinions as to the origin of Valentine's Day. Some experts state that it originated from St. Valentine, a Roman who was

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-1170700755232608342007-02-05T13:19:00.000-05:002007-02-05T13:39:15.263-05:00

January 23rd marked the one-year anniversary of our arrival. We seem to be over the ‘hump’, as the long-stay expats put it – the moment when the exotic experience of life in Thailand melds its way into commonplace day-to-day activities. We’re feeling very much at home and many of the tense question marks that stippled the horizon over the past twelve months are now memory wisps floating over

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-1167064454608200172006-12-25T11:32:00.000-05:002006-12-25T11:34:14.623-05:00

This is Christmas Day, 2006. The Thai government gave us quite a wonderful Christmas present; permanently renewable visas that do not require us to leave the country every three months on, so-called, ‘visa runs.’ It’s a rather big deal, because visa runs are costly and hurried nuisances, so we are celebrating the day for a number of reasons. Visa runs appear, on the surface, to be senseless

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-1161719885936967012006-10-24T15:11:00.000-04:002006-10-27T01:10:53.453-04:00

Visa Run III was a whirlwind affair. Flight to Singapore early Monday morning and flight back to Phuket earlier the following Tuesday morning. It had to be done that way. I’m not recovered enough from my accident to endure the all day van and boat ride to Burma and the Thai Immigration Office demanded we get our 90 day departure and reentry stamps to keep our class ‘B’ visas validated.

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-1158754887872833932006-09-20T08:12:00.000-04:002006-09-20T10:48:06.546-04:00

AP file photo. It’s my guess that the coup d’etat was not as much of a surprise here as it was in the rest of the world. Thailand has been in political limbo for months. Prime Minister Thaksin took it upon himself to maintain a “caretaker” government after last April’s election was determined to be illegal. New elections were scheduled for October and there was little doubt in anyone’s mind

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-1157988714938886452006-09-11T10:53:00.000-04:002006-09-20T20:16:38.783-04:00

Thai cooking is inventive and delicious, but the Bangkok Phuket Hospital goes the extra yard. My last lunch there was to die with. The lamp had a nutty flavor that I couldn’t quite place, but the pasta was definitely marinated Thai silk tassels (probably not from the original lampshade, though). Good marks all around. I checked out of the hospital too soon. A few more days of total

Bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21026296.post-1155932459899254252006-08-18T16:16:00.000-04:002006-08-18T16:20:59.910-04:00

Folks is folks the world ‘round. The mores of various social enclaves often telegraph notions of sophistication, naiveté, or inaccessibly exotic cultures to travelers to foreign lands. Our quest for the extraordinary, an escape from the humdrum we know, an escape from a political situation we are uncomfortable with, a draw to a more comfy climate, a useless attempt to escape from ourselves, or

Bnoreply@blogger.com