Not the best pictures I've taken, but you've got to see these karaoke booths

It all started with karaoke. Not my forte but it’s insanely popular in Thailand. So much so that my students asked me to sing karaoke with them at a small karaoke “shop”, sober in the middle of the day, like they were asking me to play football.

The karaoke shop is little more than a small building with wooden walls dividing the space into several small booths equipped with TVs, computers, stools, large speakers and microphones. The booths seemed way too small, but it’s normal to see someone enjoying himself or herself singing alone. We, on the other hand, were packed into our strange wooden booth.

50 baht buys 10 songs. There were no English songs but I was expected to sing. For me it was more like a fast reading exercise, trying to pronounce the Thai syllables as they were highlighted across the bottom of the screen. As horrible as I was at it, it was great practice for reading and speaking Thai.

Big Ass, Bodyslam, Clash, Palmy, Potato, Pu. We hit all the favorites. Concentrating on the letters I missed most of the videos of handsome and beautiful, love-stricken Thais fomenting their feelings about unrequited love, break ups, being cheating on or any other moments that incited hysterical actions and crying forlornly, looking out into the pouring rain.

May, Tik, Ing and Iw were nice enough to not force the microphone on me too often and sang most of the songs themselves, cheering or groaning when the computer scored their performances. At the end of the 10 songs we left and Ing and Iw (twins from the birthday party) I was delighted that they had their fill and weren’t ready to go another 10 songs. I was however invited to Ing and Iw’s house for a home cooked meal.

I already forgot what the dish is called but I think it's Yam Yo San

There’s no direct translation for the dish. I don’t know what to call it on a menu, but the longer description would be spicy, sweet, and sour thin glass noodles mixed with pork. At my students Ing and Iw's house, they decided to teach me to cook this dish admitting from the beginning that it might be delicious, and it might not. The did however guarantee that it would be edible.

First we chopped up the pork. Well, kind of. We just mutilated it with a knife, somewhere between mincing it and pulverizing it. By the time we were done with it, it didn't really look like anything.

Then we boiled water and softened the glass noodles in it. Seconds later we took out the noodles and put them in a bowl before dropping in our pork. The gelatinous pork cooked quickly and was then added to the noodles.

Mixed with the noodles and pork was: peanuts, fish sauce, lime juice, thinly sliced cucumber, more fish sauce, 7 chilies (an amount we decided perfect after a small debate and each eating one raw), garlic, sugar, more fish sauce, chili sauce, tiny tomatoes, more chili sauce, and MSG (pictured). And then we took a taste only to find out it needed more fish sauce.

It’s a strange mix to stir. The noodles stick together, the meat and noodles stick together and the rest just looks funny and spreads around unevenly. After stirring long enough, it finally mixed well enough and the result was a classic Thai dish; an intersection of just about every flavor and texture our palates can sense. Spicy, sweet, sour, crunchy, soft, chewy.

I will say that this dish is not photogenic. If you went to a Thai restaurant and saw a picture of it on the wall, you’d go for something else. It’s actually quite delicious. Maybe my palate has adjusted after living here for over a year and a half but I really liked it. It wasn't the only thing we ate either. Along with the dish we had sticky rice, an omelet, garlic-dried pork and red fanta. Sap!



After dinner we took a walk through their village. Admittedly, I didn’t expect to see much but I guess this is why I take these chances and try to say yes to every opportunity that arises. A small walk down a dirt road turned into a bio-culture class taught by Ing and Iw.

Whether they know it or not, the girls are extremely aware of their natural surroundings. As we walked down the street they pointed out different flowers, naming them in Thai and an English. One hanging bright yellow flower was a culture symbol of Thailand, another was used for the traditional flowers they decorate Buddha images with. As I looked out into the woods and saw dry, crackling brush growing amongst boring trees, Ing and Iw saw food. They showed me the tiny fruits of different trees and easily identified other fruit trees that had been picked clean. It soon realized that just about every single tree in the village produced an edible fruit of some sort.

Jackfruit, limes, tamarinds, papayas, pineapples, coconuts, bananas, and a myriad of fruits I’ve never heard of grew everywhere. The girls even pointed out root vegetables that looked like weeds and trees used for making paper, all on a 2 kilometer walk.

Half way through I laughed thinking that if I had been stuck here all alone, I’d have starved unaware of how most fruits and vegetables grow and clueless as to what other things are edible. The girls on the other hand looked around the woods as we Americans would look through our pantry.

While walking by houses I was stared at. A lot. Ing and Iw told me I was the first white person they’re grandfather had ever seen. He’s 90. I was afraid I was going to give the old guy a heart attack. I'm sure this small street and village is not a place falang usually end up. As we walked through the village people looked out and quickly asked the girls what the hell I was doing there. I avoided most conversation, pretending to not understand, just smiling instead. This made the walk go a little faster and allowed the girls to decide when and where we should stop and chat.

A walk through time, old women worked in front of their family home weaving large rugs and blankets on complex looms of bamboo, wood and string. This lady said she had already been working on this particular piece for a month. Beyond the actual weaving, the slow process of spinning the homemade yarn into spools and preparing the loom is a task I can hardly imagine. Sure, these ladies have nothing but time but it's still hard to imagine having that much patience to spend a couple months making it and then sell the rug for $20.

As the sun burst through a cluster of small clouds, we continued walking to a local pond where we saw several people leading their cows and water buffaloes back home. Ing and Iw found river snails and clams in the river, both of which they claim are delicious, adding to their long list of edibles that I would have looked over. (I'd kill a cow.) Heading back in a different direction we walked to a wat where monks had built a small waterfall, and strode past a school yard busy with volleyball, takra, and potato sack races. By the time we were back at their place I was completely exhausted, ready to head home, my brain full of new Thai fruits and my belly full of new Thai food.

How do you eat birthday cake?

My students never asked me this question and I never thought about teaching it, but oddly enough, Thais have no idea how to eat a birthday cake.

Twin students of mine, Ing and Iw, threw their own 17th birthday party at a local Korean barbeque restaurant on one of my last days in Buakhao. Lara and I were guests of honor and we brought cake and candles to show the students what western b-days are like.

Thais don’t normally celebrate birthdays at all. They rarely give gifts to the birthday boy or girl, almost never eat cake and most don't have even a small party. But Ing and Iw are hip to falang culture and they took advantage or the opportunity to have some fun. They invited their closest friends who happen to be my best students.

After dinner we brought out the cake and candles and explained the tradition of having a candle per year, singing “Happy Birthday”, then making a wish and blowing out the candles. The 17 candles took up all the room on the cake and the girls lit the outside candles first making it nearly impossible to light the inner candles without burning their fingers. This was only the first of their newbie birthday mistakes.

Then we sang “Happy Birthday” without the refrain “happy birthday, dear _____” which Thais replace with saying happy birthday twice, just for simplicity. Ing and Iw were excited when they blew out all of the candles and thus granting their wish. But then they quickly blurted out their wishes to their friends (to get good grades) and blew it. I had forgot to tell them about the superstition attached to the wish-making, that if you tell anyone your wish, it won’t come true. They were dissapointed, but as all Thais do when they're dissapointed, they laughed.

With a knife from the kitchen, the girls began to cut their cake together, each with a hand on the handle of the knife. Lara and I looked at eachother. Then the kids started singing, “Dah, dah, da-dah” – the wedding song. Lara and I looked at each other again, both realizing that yes, they had mixed up the traditions. Then Ing and Iw fed each other pieces of the cake, each threatening to shove the cake in the other’s face. Lara and I laughed.

Wedding cake rituals aside, they cut out two pieces of cake, handed them to Lara and I on plates, and then passed out spoons to everyone else. Like the begining of a race, the entire group of girls quickly swiped at the cake (minus two slices) in a mad spoon free for all. First went all of the icing, leaving just a strange, deformed mound of cake but in less than half a minute only small crumbs were left.

Buakhao School, Ampher Kuchinarai, Jangwat Kalasin

During my last days of school I brought my camera around with me and took some pictures of my students. I gave them my blog address and promised I would post some of these pics up for them. So here, as promised to them, and so everyone else can see my beautiful students, are those pics:

Most people do it with a long bamboo pole, but if you’re cool

then you have a monkey to fetch you coconuts out of the tall trees. I was leaving to run some errands and looked over at the neighbors –who are usually doing little more than drinking whiskey- and I saw this monkey sitting on the back of a motorbike. The guys who, of course, were drinking, told me it was their friend’s monkey and that it was trained just for climbing up trees and throwing down coconuts. They sell the coconuts for a Baht a piece. As for the monkey, it looks like he gets meals and free rides on the motorbike but no whiskey.

WalMart's got nothing on the variety and super-low prices of our Sunday Market

If you need it, they have it at the Sunday market. Mats, bags, sticky rice holders, baskets. Soaps, detergents, blankets, pillows, sheets. Brooms, mops, twigs (i still don't know how the sellers find people to buy twigs.)


Shirts -used and new- , uniforms, fashionable hats, bracelets, amulets and muumuus.Footballs, whicker takra balls, shuttlecocks. Fermented fish sauce, meat on a stick, fresh rambutans, pineapples, coconuts and mangosteens. Karaoke CDS, pirated movies, the hottest new Mor Lam or Big Ass.

Plastic junk, metal junk, junk food, knock-offs, rip-offs. And the traffic is chaos: bikes, motorbikes, tuk-tuks, songthaews, tractors, trucks, semis, taxis.

A example of the large range of foods I consider "meat on a stick", these delicious "meatballs" skewered three at a time are some of my favorite. More specifically, the green and yellow ones that don't appear to be exciting at all. For 10 Baht (a quarter) you can get a stick and if you buy two, that's good enough to fill you. In Thai we call it "luuk jin" but that roughly translates to "Chinese pieces" or "Chinese balls" so Dimsum works just as well.


I'm not a big buyer at the market but I love to walk around and see what the stalls have to offer. Just a small glimpse of the strange items available every Sunday morning, here are some from this last weekend:

This T-shirts is a great example of the endemic English problems in Thailand. The mistake with the "R" is only the addition of a single line but with it, it just doesn't translate. Though we can figure it out "COMRANY" just isn't a word. There are hundreds of mistakes like this, and most are even worse showing sentences without verbs (happy cloud sky rainbow wonderful!) or incorrect grammar that confuses the entire meaning (I miss you not forget when I smile.)

This shirt is a plain example of another type of entertaining shirts, the ones that despite their understandable English, are still confusing. "I saw Mrs. Body-X kissing Mrs. Body-X." Who Mrs. Body-X is I don't know and I'm pretty sure I'll never have the pleasure of finding out. Further, this T-shirt appears to be a knock on "I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus." What that has to do with the mysterious Mrs. Body-X I don't know...

A DVD in the "CENTURY" series, the Donald Rumsfeld episode looks good, promising excitement with a random building exploding as background to Rummy's furrowed brow and pointing finger. I didn't shuck out the 99 Baht to become the lucky owner of this documentary but I'd say its cover is a fair image of foreign opinion on our leaders.