Sometimes I feel like we don’t emphasize enough how astonishing an establishment the Chatrium is. Here you can see the care they put into Valentine’s Day.
(The upside-down lady is not a Valentine’s decoration, she is always there, constantly inspiring us to be, each in our own way, more athletic.)
Some people have been wondering about what the political situation is like in Bangkok. There were elections last week, but they didn’t seem to achieve anything; official results have not been released, and anyway everyone knows what there will be. There are still a lot of protesters in the city; they’re camped out in a handful of sites. Here, for example, is the National Stadium last week:
The people camping out in all of the tents are probably from the south of the country; people from the south are upset about the ongoing war in that region. This morning, the number of tents seemed to have thinned out a bit:
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IMG_0478-480p.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
(This is from a slightly different angle; both are from the Skytrain station. It’s nice that it’s the Sport Science Bureau that’s the site of the occupation.) But: the protests continue, and there’s no obvious stopping point. It’s a minor annoyance if you want to go to things near the sites, and the traffic in the city has been even worse than usual, but our lives really haven’t been impacted that much.
Oi, our nanny, is upcountry on business, which means that I am once again in charge of Harriet’s entertainment during the day. After running some errands, we went off to visit the Purr Cat Cafe Club, which is exactly what the name suggests, a café full of cats. I had assumed that cat cafés were a Japanese invention, but Wikipedia insists they are Taiwanese and goes on to theorize that they are forms of pet rental, which is illegal in Boston. This is not actually the case at the Purr Cat Cafe Club, as they don’t charge you anything to go in, though you are expected to buy drinks. It was maybe not so much a café as their coffee machine is broken but this is a quibble and honestly no one goes to a cat café for the coffee. Wikipedia also claims that cat cafés are heavily licensed, which seems unlikely in Bangkok, where anyone could presumably charge admission to a houseful of cats (and fireworks, if so desired) as long as you were paying off the police.
Harriet is of the opinion that it is one of the finest establishments in Bangkok and is aggrieved that we have not been visiting regularly since we’ve arrived. We can make up for lost time, I guess. The café has a large number of cats, twenty or so, which are reasonably friendly and more fluffy than is usual for cats. I suspect they were not found on the street, though it is interesting to imagine what kind of a Bangkok cat café could be staffed that way. There is the difficult rule that the cats may not be picked up, which is always Harriet’s first impulse; but she did an admirable job of restraining herself and we were not thrown out. Here are a bunch of pictures.
Okay, we’re back from Khao Yai. Khao Yai is a national park that’s to the northeast of Bangkok (see this helpful map). It’s mountainous and still full of jungle. As is customary when we leave Bangkok, I forgot to take any photos, especially good ones. But here is some of what happened.
The national park is big and full of a lot of things, though we didn’t see many of them. First we went on a little trail that had fine lookouts over a vertiginous drop:
Then we had lunch at a place which had a nice sign reading “Khao Yai Welfare” which I failed to photograph. We were visited by this garbage deer who was busying herself eating the welfare refuse:
Shortly after this picture was taken, all the dishes did fall off the bench and the staff shooed the deer away, though she didn’t go very far. The deer are extremely large, more like low-slung elk than white-tailed deer. Maybe this is what happens when deer are fed on meat scraps. They don’t seem like deer that one would want to trifle with.
After that we went to attempt to find a waterfall because that is what you do in Khao Yai. Along the trail were threatening signs like this:
But we did not see any crocodiles, maybe because there is only one of them. Khao Yai is also full of wild elephants; we didn’t see any of them either. We did see signs of them:
There were fresher signs of them, but I have your delicate sensibilities in mind, dear reader. What we’d forgotten in all of this, of course, was that it was the dry season and not the wet season, so that the waterfalls were not so much waterfalls as small trickles:
They were still very pleasant. Probably in the wet season the river would have deluged the path and the crocodile would have eaten us.
At the trail head we were confronted with inscrutable pictograms:
And a relative of the previous garbage deer, this one who seemed to have developed a taste for campers, or at least tents:
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/garbage-deer.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
At this point, we decided to leave for our own safety. Back at the resort, Harriet demonstrated some promise in pig-training:
Also we saw this fine lizard:
Some other things happened, who can even remember. The area around Khao Yai is chock-full of faux-Italian villages for some reason, which basically seem to exist so that Thai tourists can take pictures of each other in them. This sounds like it would be entertaining but it is not. Basically it’s like this:
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IMG_0469-480p.mov” width=”360″ height=”640″]
After that we went to the Chokchai Cowboy Farm which is basically false advertising as though don’t grow any cowboys there. But Harriet got to ride a pony:
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IMG_0477-480p.mov” width=”360″ height=”640″]
So it wasn’t entirely a waste. And after that we went home, the end.
We are in Khao Yai for the weekend, a national park to the northeast of Bangkok. So far Harriet has met a jackfruit tree:
And also a pig:
Inspired, perhaps, by the example of poor Starbung (see previously), the Chatrium has taken it upon itself to offer its own Subway sandwiches for the month of February.
We weren’t kidding about the frequency of fireworks here. Here are some of last night’s, the occasion of which was uncertain: maybe they were because no alcohol can be sold this weekend because there’s (ostensibly) an election next weekend and people need something to do; or maybe because Chinese New Year is at the end of the month. Either is a good enough excuse.
One of the saddest of American assumptions is that fireworks are for once a year, the Fourth of July. This is a terrible mistake. Everybody could really be having fantastic fireworks every single night. These ones, as far as we can tell, seem to be celebrating the fact that it’s Sunday night.
(One might imagine that in a city full of protests, some of which have been attracting thrown grenades lately, there might be some hesitation about setting off loud explosions. No.)
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/347.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
The ongoing protests have maybe been obscuring what this blog is really about, which is of course monitor lizards. The protesters have given up their senseless occupation of the zoo, so on Thursday we went to see how things were there: much the same as ever.
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/337.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/340.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/339-4.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/341.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]
Today is the day that the protesters have planned to shut down Bangkok. The view from our balcony this morning seems pretty normal; but there’s clearly less traffic going down Charoen Krung and there are fewer cars dropping off students at Shrewsbury.
