It’s a lotus that I found down the street and it’s starting to bloom:
The plant also has fish living in its pot: they are two guppies of uncertain variety, named by the baby, confusingly, Harriet and Mister Pendleton. They are shy and my phone is not very good at photographing them; also, fish being what they are, and the baby’s fish-caring skills being what they are, they may not be long for this world. But rest assured that they are there.
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A rare action shot:
(Explanation of her sartorial choices: a tuk-tuk driver gave her a plastic bag to wear as a rain hat.)
Maybe we should be concerned.
It’s the rainy season. Most of the time we forget this because there’s not much rain, but yesterday we got a serious shower:
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We cooked the gac with rice and coconut milk. It made a fine breakfast, but not quite fine enough that we’ll be rushing out to buy more gacs.
We bought a gac the other day. Here’s what it looked like:
(You can also use this opportunity to learn the Thai names of the week and their colors from Harriet’s table.)
Gac is a smaller variety of jackfruit (some details here) more commonly found in Vietnam. I’d been looking for one since trying gac juice at the Bang Nam Pheung floating market in Samut Prakan, which we thoughtfully failed to get any pictures of, so you’ll have to imagine how wonderful it was. But gac juice was really nice. So when I saw a gac for sale next to the shoe repair guy, I bought one. It’s kind of squishy, like a slightly deflated football that got a cactus with child.
When you cut it open it looks like this:
It’s an extremely dramatic fruit inside! Unfortunately it doesn’t really live up to that in taste: it’s kind of bland, a little like a softball, and the seeds that I cut open actively taste bad. The gac juice we had must have been heavily sweetened. It’s possible that this one isn’t ripe; certainly I wouldn’t know. Right now I am soaking the flesh and seeds with some rice to make xôi gấc, though who knows how that will turn out.
In cup-mad Bangkok, I finally managed to get a coffee-in-a-bag:
Golden Mount (Phu Khao Thong) is an artificial hill inside of Wat Saket. It’s composed of the dirt that used to fill some of the canals; once it was the tallest structure in Bangkok, but that hasn’t been true for years. But it’s a pleasant walk to the top, where you can see the whole city, and back down again:
Also there are bells to ring:
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