Soleil's "Animals in Thailand" movie

We made this movie after returning home and for Thailand Country Day.  Many of the animals in the "Foe" section are not really dangerous (though some are)...but we took some artistic/dramatic license.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWrDkwS8LDg

A couple of other notes from Lisa:

There are many ethical issues related to animals in Thailand which Soleil didn't address in this film.  It's questionable how the elephants are treated in many circumstances outside of the sanctuaries.  Also the monkey in the cage was rescued by the owner who clearly loves him and takes good care of him.  He was originally owned by someone who was not as nice to him.  I'm also not sure about the monkey with the lease on which was tied up outside of someones house.  I can say that I didn't have a warm fuzzy feeling about his life.  

Chiang Mai Cooking Class

[By Lisa]


Recently someone described me as someone who loves to cook.  I don't think of myself that way but I suppose it must be true since I seem to enjoy taking cooking classes when I travel.  Italian food class in Florence and now Thai.


We happened upon Dash! Restaurant and Bar by chance. The gorgeous teak building and open patio space caught our attention; The customers having lunch on the patio told us that the food was great and that the restaurant was even rated 1st on TripAdvisor.  Enough said!  I agreed with the assessment so I later contributed my own review.  

The owners Noi (mom) and Dash (son) are Thais who have lived for many years in Seattle so their customers benefit from excellent Western food and Western quality standards of meat cuts and cleanliness. But unlike so many places which serve farang food at Dash! we found the best of both worlds with no compromise to the authenticity of Thai cooking and style. The Thai food was so good that I inquired about Noi's cooking classes. 

Joe and I did a semi-private class with a couple from Long Island and in the process how to make 15 different dishes over the course of 10 hours spread over two days. 


Our class started with a visit to the wholesale market which was blocks and blocks of vendors of every conceivable food and food-like substance.  Here's Noi with a mushroom which looks like an ear:

Back at the restaurant, Noi's amazing assistant Pet had washed and chopped all of the ingredients.  I was a little disappointed as I'd hoped to do a little more of the hands-on prep-work but because we were making 15 dishes I understand why it was necessary to have some of the work done up front.

Chicken broth is added to every dish when more liquid is required.  This pot was cooked on low for quite a long time. 

One of my favorites from the entire class was this one.  I don't remember the name but it's essentially fried shrimp in a cornstarch batter topped with tamarind sauce and crispy fried onions and cilantro.  Really delicious.  Ask me to make it for you sometime.

What an amazing value!! While more expensive than other classes I saw advertised with Noi we got private attention, learned how to make almost every dish we could desire, were fed for two days, and benefited from Noi's cross-cultural knowledge in ways we may not have in other situations. Our brains and our stomachs were FULL, FULL, FULL. Noi generously shared her knowledge, secret recipes and those of her mother and kept us entertained with her lively, quirky personality. If you're interested in learning how to cook Thai food, I'd recommend getting to Noi quickly since she's talking about retiring. Hopefully, she'll keep offering her wonderful classes even as Dash and the rest of the lovely staff (like assistant Pet) take more and more responsibility for the business. 

Oh, yes and be sure to try Noi's excellent cheesecake (ours came with a lovely passionfruit sauce). We've got another week to try more of the menu and the coconut cake is on my list.

Noodling on Noodles

[By Kai]

Noodles are a big (and my favorite) part of Thai cuisine. But how are they made? We went to a noodle factory in Mae Saliang, and, well, here's how.

It all starts with the rice. Huge baskets of it. Farmers from various villages collect it and store it under their houses in these:

It's all brown rice, though, and noodles are made with white rice, so they have to manually remove the husks to get at the pure white rice inside. They do that with machines like this:

Stepping on the lever lifts the pounding log up, and stepping off drops it, sending it falling down on the bucket of rice below. The constant pounding smashes the rice out of the husks relatively quickly, but they still have to spend about an hour stepping on and off of the machine.

Once the rice is separated, they have to get the husks out. They do this using an awesome technique where they put the rice in a flat basket and throw it in the air repeatedly. The heavier rice flies higher than the light husks, and the wind created by the rice landing pushes the husks out of the basket. It looks a little like this:

Even then, they have to go through another step and manually pick the larger husks out of the basket. Once that's finally done, though, the rice is ready to be made into noodles. The rice is first made into a paste by mysterious methods that I have no knowledge of. The paste is then put in metal canister at the noodle factory.

They heat a huge pot of water up until it boils, using sawdust as their fuel, because it's much cheaper than wood.

Not that the price really matters, though, because they have such a ridiculous stockpile of sawdust I can't imagine they'll ever run out.

Next, they use a device a little like a shower handle to suck up the rice paste and spray it into the pot of water. The rice solidifies as soon as it hits the boiling water, turning into noodles.

They mix the noodles a bit, then package them and move to another batch. They take a handful of noodle and wrap it into a plastic bag. Six of these bags together make a larger bag.

Next, they sell the bags of noodles to restaurants, who turn them into things like this:

(In case you're wondering, that's blood soup. Apparently blood solidifies and turns into a brown blob when you fry it, and is eaten in a noodle soup. Don't ask me.)


All that work for a bowl of noodles...

42

I now own an awesome pair of shoes. We were walking through the a market in Surithani when we suddenly spotted a shoe stall/shop/thing. As I needed a new pair of flip-flops, we looked around for a while before seeing these:

As if that weren’t cool enough, look at the shoe size, written in large numbers on the ENTER key:

Crazy, huh? As I previously said, I now own an awesome pair of shoes. Here, for good measure, is a 

picture of a kitten.

My Explanation

Alright, I suppose an explaination is owed. A little while ago, I posted a most likely confusing and, I suppose, conceivably even insulting message. Here I quote:

“You need to watch your weight. All that bacon this morning may have put on the pounds.”

Begin explaination.

The story begins with Soleil, who is hopelessly addicted to various iPhone games. She therefore often either begs for my mom’s phone or simply steals it. To prevent this, my parents both put passcodes on their phones. Disliking the injustice, I rebelled against our tyrannical dictators and proceeded to reliably crack their codes, leaving little messages behind informing them exactly what their various combinations were.  Eventually, however, I decided to do something a little more complicated and, with the help of Soleil and Lea, created a complex path of notes for my mom to follow the next time I figured out her password. We changed her password and then told her that in order to recover use of her phone, she would need to follow our directions. All of this, of course, was under the name P.A.L. (Password Acquirer’s League). We then went even bigger and better on our next attack, giving dad a longer and more complicated path. One of the steps along the way told him to do some more blogging, prompting him to look at the blog and discover the message. (In case you’re wondering, it then led him to the scale, which then led him to both a teacup and his hat, which contained two ingenious strips of paper designed by Lea. On one was written, rather ambiguously:

“19”

Try flipping that over. On the other:

“68”

There was no sign of how they were arranged, so his password could have been 1968, 1989, 6168, or 6189. Oh, and the iPhone locks for a minute after 6 incorrect tries, which wouldn’t be horrible, except for the fact that we had intentionally put in 5 incorrect answers beforehand. It was great fun.

For most of us. 

Change in Thailand

My family has become accustomed to me comparing our experiences here in Thailand with my six-month visit in 1989 and so they are VERY clear that much has changed.  Twenty-three years ago there were no cell-phones, very few computers and back then towns which are now cities were much smaller villages.

While technologic changes and globalization have impacted the whole world the differences are extraordinarily obvious in Thailand.  But what I notice even more is the increase in tourism.  (Perhaps this is sort of like when you're pregnant all you see is pregnant people.)  Tourism has become rampant here.   The year of my first visit, two years after the 1987 "Visit Thailand" campaign, tourists numbered about 4 million annually.  The campaign was highly successful, increasing tourism steadily, so that now the annual number of foreign visitors is close to 20 million.  This means that in 1989 the average ratio of Thais to tourist was 14:1 while today's current average ratio is 4:1.  In many places we've been there seem to be more "farang" than Thais.  Swedes in Khao Lok, Danes on Koh Pra Thong, French in Chiang Mai etc.  This, like most changes, appears to have had both a positive and negative impact on the country.

Here are some of the changes I've noticed:

-the level of English-language skills is much improved
-there are far more expats living here for longer lengths of time
-there appears to be more prosperity

-more focus on prosperity has impacted some of the more old-fashioned Thai values

One of the sobering things is that so much of what we experience now, both at home and through our visits to other countries, will be different when they are adults.  Just as my dad has a sentimental memory of Jiminy Cricket Island near Victoria, BC, I, too, have memories of many of seeing Northern Thai baudy street shows and being in places in Thailand where the local people giggle and point just for the sight of a white person (those still exist, but you must go much farther off the beaten track).  I pointed out to the kids that some of the things we're seeing and experiencing now just won't exist when they're my age.  Perhaps it will be the tuk tuks, or cars, or the waterfall, the

Today at breakfast we were discussing the idea of change and technological advancement.  Joe commented that he could, in one weekend, make a device that could increase the speed of the Lawa women's weaving process by a huge margin.

We've been reading Ella Enchanted and notice the wonderful related symbolism of Lucinda's Spell.  In the story, Lucinda, thinks she's doing Ella a huge favor by giving her the gift of "obedience".  In reality the gift turns out to be a terrible curse.

Finding (or at least looking at) Nemo

[By Kai]

Modern technology these days. A hundred years ago horse drawn carts were the standard form of transportation: now, with the help of a little technology, we can quite easily breathe underwater. Recreationally. Seriously, though. Breathing underwater. It’s really an extremely strange experience. The first breath is terrifying; the unreasonable side of your brain is screaming at you not to breathe in, that you can’t breathe underwater and will get a lungful of water.  Once you do get underwater, however, it’s amazing. The fish, swimming all around you. You’re floating, easily, and you can propel yourself any direction you want. It’s like flying.

By now you’ve probably figured out that we went scuba diving. Well, congratulations, you’ve just won a prize, because yes, yes we did. Golden Buddha Resort, (remember that place?) had a small dive shop a five minute walk from our room, which served as our base of operations. The course was set up strangely, in an unfitting college course style. (It actually counts as college credit.) Every day, we would first read a chapter of our textbooks on diving, complete with tests and pictures. (Oh, and constant reminders about how our scuba suit can look "stylish". Guess some company funds PADI.) We then went to the dive shop for another test, and a check of the tests we had done at home. When the testing was finally over, we were briefed by our instructor, a Frenchman named Gregoire, who, being French, pronounced H’s where there shouldn’t be H’s, and took out the H’s when there should have been some. This got very confusing, as the most common word in scuba diving is probably “air”. We now all had “hair” in our lungs. 

After a few minutes of frantically trying to breathe past the hair in our lungs (I kid, I kid), we finally began to get our scuba stuff on. This consists of a mask, goggles, fins, an inflatable thing that lets you rise and sink underwater, and… the tank. My nemesis. Our tanks were big, They were heavy. They were unfortunately very necessary due to them carrying all of our air. To add to this, their attachment was not meant for land, and was very uncomfortable. The real problem, though, was that the water was a good 5 minute walk from the place where we suited up. I cursed the tank every step of the way. I did eventually get in the water, though, and then I became weightless.

Doing the swim test portion of the PADI course - 300 meters

Underwater, we did a variety of different exercises, from neutralizing our buoyancy to having our air turned off and being forced to rely on a partner’s alternate air source. The hardest one, though, was taking off and putting back on our mask, underwater. It doesn’t sound difficult at all, but taking off your mask causes your nose to be exposed, and breathing through your mouth only with water tickling the bottom of your nose is a strangely difficult and very panic-inducing thing. Then there was the challenge of putting the mask back on. I put it on, easily enough, but it was unfortunately filled with water. When underwater, you clear your mask by looking up and blowing through your nose, so I proceeded to do exactly that. However, I had air, I mean…hair… not really air… actually hair this time… trapped in my mask, letting all of the water back in every time I cleared it.  And we didn’t only have to do this exercise once. Oh no. No, we did it practically every single class. Naturally.

After I (mostly) got used to it, though, we got to do the thing we’d been waiting for: a trip to the reefs. We got on a fairly nice speedboat and began a 2 hour trip to the Surin Islands, one of the top dive sites anywhere in the world. To exit the water, we had to do a special maneuver where we sat on the edge of the boat and rolled over backwards into the water. It’s scary at first, but once you get used to it it’s no problem. We proceeded to dive, dropping down immediately and swimming around the bottom. There were fish. Everywhere. Thousands of fish, swimming all around us. Schools of fish, swimming in perfect synchronization. Big fish. Little fish. Striped fish. Rainbow fish. Have I mentioned that there were fish? Seriously, though, there were an amazing number of fish. We saw a thin meter-long fish that looked like a big tube. We saw a shiny fish with every color of the rainbow on its scales. We saw clownfish (funny, everyone here calls them “Nemo-fish”) darting in and out of their sea anemone. We saw a beautiful school of green and blue fish. We saw a spotted eel in the cracks of a rock. We saw huge clams as big as a small dog. We saw a huge…mega-school of fish that covered an entire mini-reef. We saw everything imaginable.

On the second dive, we moved to a slightly different area. This one had less fish, it seemed, but that could have been because we broke a crucial (at least according to the textbook) law of scuba diving. We started the dive (dun dun) with the current. (dramatic sound) The problem is that you start the dive swimming along the current, so when you come back, you’re swimming against it. You want it to be the other way around, so if you get tired at some point the current will carry you to the boat, not away from it. Unfortunately, we weren’t doing that, so we had to swim against the current going back. The current was pushing us almost as fast as we could swim, and it was a struggle to even stay in the same place. Dad and Gregoire got far ahead of Mom and me, to the point where the lowish visibility made them almost disappear from view. If we had just been aboveground, we could have just shouted for them to slow down, but it’s hard to yell legibly underwater, especially with a regulator (the thing that gives you air) in your mouth. Eventually, we caught back up with each other, signaled the boat, and got picked up.

So yeah, we’re all certified PADI Open Water Divers now. That means we can dive to up to 18 meters (that’s about 60 feet) underwater without an instructor. We get a little card and everything. 

May you never have hair in your lungs!