I Was Promised Raccoons

Posted on 29 May 201629 May 2016 by Dan Visel

The ranks of Bangkok cat cafés and their habitués were deeply shaken last year to learn that there was a new cat café that featured not only cats but fennec foxes and also raccoons. We had not managed to go until today, mostly because this new cat café was not actually in Bangkok, it’s in Pak Kret. Pak Kret is Thailand’s third largest city; you’ve never heard of it, nor, probably, of Nonthaburi, Thailand’s second largest city, because they are effectively indistinguishable from Bangkok’s urban sprawl. Nonthaburi is home to Thailand’s most delicious durian which maybe I have spoken of here; it is also accessible by the express boat, if you manage to get the right express boat. Pak Kret is a little more complicated. You can theoretically get a taxi to take you there, but who knows what will happen. So I was steeling myself for the complicated set of interactions necessary to explain that we really wanted to go to a random part of Pak Kret.

But! It turns out that Little Zoo Café has one of the most functional websites to be found in all of Thailand, and a van reservation system, so I reserved two tickets on the van and Harriet and I went up to dysfunctional mess/waterpark that is the Bangkok Children’s Museum until it was time for the van to take us to the raccoon-filled wonderland that we supposed Little Zoo Café to be. The van was supposed to be outside a particular exit of the BTS station at 12:45; we dutifully arrived at 12:45 and looked for a van and did not manage to find one. Possibly the van was tremendously late? It’s Bangkok traffic, it’s hard to say, and also that particular stop was full of everyone in the world because they all go up to Chatuchak for the weekend. Maybe it was wrong to hope that a van would show up and take us to a place full of raccoons.

Eventually we decided to cut our losses and prepared to explain what we were trying to do to a taxi driver; somehow the first one I approached seemed more than happy to drive us the forty-five minutes to Pak Kret, and, astonishingly, was able to read maps. And so we arrived, much later than we had intended, at a little strip mall in Pak Kret that has the Little Zoo Café.

First up: there were no raccoons. Not even one. It’s true there was a drawing of one. The staff did not speak a great deal of English, so I felt embarrassed about asking if the raccoons had all gone crazy and escaped and the rabies situation in Pak Kret was presently getting out of hand, which is about what I would expect out of a raccoon café. Feral dogs and cats, it has been noted, do extremely well in Bangkok—it is basically impossible to have a 7/11 here without a fat homeless dog sleeping in front of the door and it concerns me a little that the Chatrium’s 7/11 has no such dog—though I expect a raccoon population would soon put them all out of work. There were no signs of struggle.

Here’s what they did have:

A cage with two chinchillas (?) in it; small children were opening the door of the cage and petting the animals, who seemed nonplussed.
Two gerbils, very much asleep
Two cockatoos, loose, chewing on things
Something in an aquarium that looked like a naked mole rat, though it didn’t have any visible incisors, and might just have been a capybara with severe alopecia—no one was allowed to pet this, though whether this was from fear of disease or ferocity was unclear to me:

A rolled-up sleeping beast, relatively soft, that later turned out to be a meerkat:

A couple of cats, for good measure.

The real stars of Little Zoo come in too varieties: fennec foxes and owls. Everybody wants to play with the owls and the foxes, and the owls and the foxes don’t particularly want to play with anyone. They have two of each, and all four of them seemed a little fed up with the situation, though nobody was getting bit, and that’s something. Here’s Harriet with the big owl:

This owl did not actually like having his picture taken:

That one is of course a snowy owl. How a snowy owl arrived in Bangkok is too horrible to imagine. The other owl they had is much smaller:

I believe this one is a southern white-faced owl, which comes from southern Africa. This one they let sit on people. It seemed reasonably happy with its lot in life, unlike the snowy owl, who seemed actively embarrassed that things had come to this.

They keep the fennec foxes with the meerkat in a special enclosure where people can only come in a few at a time, to avoid scaring them. There are two fennec foxes and they live on top of a house in the window of a shop in a suburb of Bangkok, like many others:

They are not the tamest animals in the world, but they will sometimes consent to let you pet them:

(N.b., this scene is not taking place in a sauna despite the way the wood and Harriet’s hair looks.) They will also sit in your lap for a little bit:

Or even longer:

After we had bothered the animals for a while, we left. I don’t know. I was a little miffed at them for the failure of their van to arrive (we got another taxi to take us back, because our food had barely arrived when it was time for our scheduled van to leave), but mostly I was upset that they didn’t have raccoons. Raccoons are something special. Little Zoo Café seemed basically like if you went to the part of Chatuchak where they sell exotic pets and you also got someone to bring you rather overpriced food. I was a little disappointed, though it is nice to pet an owl.

Frog Season Is Here Again

Posted on 28 April 201628 April 2016 by Dan Visel

Hello. We have not died, contrary to what you might think if you get all of your news about us from this. I keep meaning to tell you about our trip to China and Macau and then about what happened on Songkran, but I haven’t finished (or particularly started, if we’re being honest) writing those up. Right now we are in the midst of a heatwave (ostensibly the worst one in Thailand since 1960) which means that everything is hot, but also that all the frogs are out at night. Here are some from right outside the Chatrium:

Note that these are city frogs recorded on my phone – probably there are plenty of other places where they would be louder. But they’re still pretty loud.

Goodbye Flower Market

Posted on 29 March 2016 by Dan Visel

One of the things that’s most astonishing about Bangkok is how quickly it changes: new buildings seem to sprout up like mushrooms at night. It’s nice to be in a city so dynamic, though often the changes seem rather poorly thought out: new buildings tend to be ugly condos or unnecessary malls. The sole criterion for permission to build would appear to be having money; and while Bangkok is a very densely populated city, it’s easy to kick out residents if they’re in the way of your plans.

So it wasn’t entirely a surprise when it was announced that the Pak Khlong Talat flower market near Saphan Phut (previously) was going to be closed at the end of March; developers have belatedly realized that riverfront property might be where it’s at. A little bit further up the river the malodorous shrimp paste market near Wat Pho was kicked out last year; the fish market up the street from us is living on borrowed time. It’s hard to tell what’s actually going to happen at the flower market: the city would like vendors to move to other areas, including a sanitized and undervisited new mall along the river.

The market does most of its business in the night, as there’s an enormous demand for fresh flowers in Bangkok. But plenty of vendors were still there this morning:

It’s not all flowers. There are a fair number of fruits and vegetables on sale:

Here are some flowers:

Denizens of the Balcony

Posted on 20 March 2016 by Dan Visel

So some time last year we went to the aquarium store down Chan Road and we acquired an aquarium with a handful of guppies. The guppies proved to be surprisingly resilient, there were baby guppies, some of the guppies were eaten by birds, and now we have three guppies. They had names but I forget what they are. In January, we got an eel named Hannibal but then, as they say, a bird ate her. After that we bought a tiny turtle who was named Rosella – at many riverfront establishments in Bangkok you can buy various aquatic creatures which you then release into the river to make merit and/or feed the catfish. Rosella has not been eaten by a bird and has in fact thrived. She is a Chinese soft-shelled turtle, a species notable for its rather extraordinary plumbing.

We’re mostly feeding her turtle food. But we thought she might like a change, so we went to the aquarium store and attempted to buy five tiny shrimp, which appear to be the variety known as dancing shrimp. There was some confusion and we ended up with five baht worth of shrimp, which meant about twenty-five of them. So we dumped them in the tank and they terrified Rosella, who was not interested in eating them, and the fish, who felt like they’d already been through a lot with the introduction of Rosella. These sort of shrimp evidently like to jump, and many of them jumped out of the tank, and were presumably eaten by birds. But now we have about ten of them, who are getting bigger and bigger.

But after all of this, the tank started getting dirty, and so we decided to solve this problem by acquiring a sucker fish, also from the aquarium store, who has been named Mrs. Primrose. Here is the whole tank seen from above:

And here is Rosella and some of the shrimp:

And here they are again:

And here is Mrs. Primrose:

She is kind of terrifying, it’s true. We hope she does well and that we don’t have to clean the tank out so often now.

We Are at the End of the World

Posted on 15 February 2016 by Dan Visel

Not really, we are on Koh Chang, over by the Cambodian border.

New Fruit Alert!

Posted on 27 January 2016 by Dan Visel

It turns out you can get baby wax apples, which are just as delicious as grown-up wax apples.

Reptiles in Bangkok 2016 Edition

Posted on 18 January 2016 by Dan Visel

This blog has been remiss in its stated purpose, keeping you up to date on the reptiles of Bangkok. So here are some things.

This is a crocodile who lives on Rachadapisek Road, between the mall where you can go trampolining and the mall where you can get sewing machines fixed.

The lakes of Lumphini Park are still chock full of monitor lizards.

Things Harriet Thought I Should Take a Picture Of in the Penang State Museum

Posted on 16 January 2016 by Dan Visel

So George Town is the capital of the state of Penang, which is mostly the island of Penang though it also includes a little bonus on the mainland, and as such it has the Penang State Museum which we marched through. It is not the most spectacular museum in the world, and you are not missing very much if you don’t go. But Harriet demanded that I take a lot of pictures of things, which I am now presenting here that you might get some kind of impression of the museum and what Harriet thought was important in it. Mostly jewels.

There was a picture of a Thai lady in a description of the various people who settled in Penang and Harriet thought she was important.

I think these are Malay wedding costumes, though I might be wrong.

Here are some rings.

Here are some anklets, poorly photographed. All of this was on my phone which doesn’t really do a good job in low light through plexiglass.

More jewels.

Why Harriet was interested in an official seal container I don’t know.

There seemed to be a lot of displays of elaborately constructed shiny fake flowers in the museums of George Town. Maybe people used to be bored and consequently made them. Harriet liked them, though it is hard to imagine any other appreciative audience.

Perhaps a suit worn by older Chinese women of Penang in historic times.

More blouses. Perhaps if Harriet had instructed me to take pictures of the placards accompanying these objects I would be able to tell you something about them but no. Also there might not have been placards? It wasn’t the greatest museum.

Another set of clothes.

I suspect that what she was most interested in here was the jewels.

A man’s suit with similar jewels.

Here you can read the description! which is maybe not very helpful.

I am not sure if that head goes with the body or not.

Harriet reliably loves a sari.

Small jeweled containers.

A large photograph of the Chinese mansion that we stayed in. I am not sure what this was doing in the museum. The photo is basically from where we ate breakfast every morning in George Town.

A lot of jewels.

More jewels, less attractive.

A lady with jewels.

Another lady with jewels.

And now you know what it is like to wander the Penang State Museum with Harriet.

Harriet’s Malaysian Boyfriends: A Selection

Posted on 16 January 2016 by Dan Visel

Okay, I’ve been remiss in filling in what we did in Singapore and Malaysia over Christmas vacation in large part because most of the pictures I took were not very good. Malaysia is very pleasant! Singapore is very civilized! But! In the hopes of filling in gaps in documentation, here are some people that Harriet met while in Malaysia.

So this is some Malaysia champion bodybuilder who had a gym in George Town with a number of large statues of himself. I don’t know if he looked like that. I think he’s dead.

Going by the gym was exhausting so everyone got foot massages. Harriet thought this was basically the best thing ever.

We spent approximately twenty-four hours in Kuala Lumpur and stumbled upon a weird Malaysian cultural introduction which involved food and a lot of dancing and this man who let you feed monkeys. Also there were chickens, not pictured.

When one is traveling with small children eventually you just throw up your hands and go to the zoo, which we did, repeatedly. This is an elephant in Melaka who was still hungry.

Here Harriet attempts to become one with a turtle sculpture in the same zoo.

This guy was on a bench at a Chinese house museum in George Town. I don’t know if he was meant to be one of the deceased owners or if he was just there so that people could take pictures with him. Either one’s possible, I guess. Harriet liked him and I think we had to give him some money, which seems a little dumb honestly.