Author: Dan Visel

Update

Posted on by Dan Visel

As you may know, we are not actually in Bangkok right now. Presently we’re in Los Angeles, having traveled through Seoul and Idaho. None of things have very much to do with our being in Bangkok which is why you haven’t heard about any of them, except for the cat cafés.

But! Just before we left, Wat Yannawa had a temple fair. Wat Yannawa is just south of Saphan Taksin, the local transportation hub; we visit it semi-regularly to feed the catfish there. Wat Yannawa is mostly notable for having an enormous shrine shaped like a boat, which Rama III had constructed because he didn’t want the local population to forget that the Chinese had settled much of this part of Bangkok with their junks. Wat Yannawa also seems to be a fairly wealthy wat: they own the parking lot right behind the boat dock we use much of the time (maybe they own the boat dock as well), which used to be a block of shophouses they owned called Soi Wanglee. About ten years ago they decided they wanted to go into real estate development and bulldozed the shops; the development deal fell through and now there’s a parking lot which is mostly empty. It used to have a hipster coffee stand, but they left. Right now it has a little funfair. Probably it’s gone by now? Who knows, we are no longer in Bangkok.

But here are some of the highlights, at least those that we remembered to video. There is one of these things that you expect to see that has a name I don’t remember – is this a Tilt-a-Whirl?

Also trampolines, which at first lead to disaster:

But then everything is of course fine:

Also goats:

That’s what happened. More when we return to Bangkok, around the end of August.

Korean Cat Café Update

Posted on by Dan Visel

The more observant of you may have noticed that we are not actually in Bangkok anymore; for the past few days we have been in Seoul. Obviously once we arrived in Korea we planned to inspect their cat cafés, the Koreans having come up with the idea in the first place. So we went to Hongdae and promptly found a promising cat café (I don’t remember what it was called but it was opposite a makeup store) but! it turned out they had a no pre-schoolers policy which, they determined, applied to Harriet. We were sad but not that sad as evidently there are eighty thousand cat cafés in Hongdae, a number which does not include the sheep cafés. But: a Korean family who were also trying to go the cat café decided to take pity on us and suggested that they give us a ride to another cat café in Sinchon. So we did that, which was a little odd, but they did seem determined that we go to a cat café. We explained it was not that big a deal, we could just walk down Chan Road to our local cat café, but that meant nothing. So we got in their car and drove to Sinchon, which is an adjoining neighborhood. Yes, this seemed strange, but they did very much want Harriet to see some cats.

We arrived in Sinchon and went to the Sinchon cat café – which did seem grander than the last one – but they also had a no children policy, which they were not willing to relax. So we can at least report that Korean cat cafés are more selective than Thai ones. The Korean family was extremely apologetic that their plan to drive us to a new cat café had not worked out and they offered to drive us to another one, but we said no, it’s fine. But they were apologetic and took us out for yoghurt shaved-ice and then to see all the sights of Sinchon. The people of Seoul, it should be said, are extremely hospitable.

We spent most of the rest of that day watching a street dance troupe which enraptured Harriet; she got an offer to join, but that would have meant giving up her lucrative powdered milk modeling career in Bangkok. Also there are no pictures of any of this because I hurled my phone at the ground, making it unresponsive; however, a shop near the Nowon subway station fixed it for under $10, so we’re back in business, though you don’t get to see what it looks like to be thrown out of a Korean cat café, who is doubtless what you wanted to see.

Exotic Fruit Report, No. 8

Posted on by Dan Visel

It’s durian season in Thailand, which probably merits a post of itself, though right now I am just enjoying eating durian every day and mulling over the possibilities of a durian and coffee diet. Mangosteens have returned, mangoes are plentiful and cheap, and there are enormous maroon lychees. The return of the rainy season is good for fruit. A few stranger things are about: snake fruit have reappeared after a few months, custard apples are around, and from time to time you run across this thing, the santol:

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The santol is evidently cultivated in the Philippines. In Thai, it’s a krathon (กระท้อน) or a sathon (สะท้อน). If you cut it open, it looks like this:

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And the white very quickly turns reddish-brown:

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The taste is tart: imagine halfway between and apple and an orange, take away the sweetness, and you’re almost there. The texture is a little custard-like, a bit like a mangosteen. It is not the most delicious thing in the world; perhaps it’s not actually ripe yet? These are the sort of just desserts one consumes if one is learning about fruit from Wikipedia.

Post-Coup Report

Posted on by Dan Visel

So we had a coup! Our presence has seemingly lead to the destabilization of a number of countries, but this was our first coup. What happens in a coup, in Thailand anyway, where people have a lot of practice, is that everyone heads to 7/11 to stock up on water just in case things go terribly wrong. Things have not gone terribly wrong so far. The first thing that happened that impacted us was the imposition of a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 p.m.; no one is supposed to be on the street, and even the 7/11 is shut down, which means that things are reasonably serious? However: our balcony looks out over Charoen Krung, a fairly major thoroughfare in the city, and it’s clear that not everyone is obeying the curfew. Maybe they are all going to the airport? One of the first thing that the junta had to say was that if you have to go to the airport the curfew doesn’t apply to you. This was perhaps the first sign that they are not the most competent rulers in the world.

The country is now headed by General Prayuth, whose previous notable achievement seems to have been the banning of pad kaprao from Army kitchens. Having fixed that problem, he has taken it upon himself to fix the country’s problems; most national political scientists and journalists of note have been taken to army facilities so that they might change their opinions. There has been, of course, a lot of criticism of this, which seems to fluster General Prayuth, who wishes that everyone would just quiet down and behave and is confused about why many people don’t think a coup is a good thing. Well.

Besides the curfew, most TV stations were initially shut down. Here’s what we saw on the first night:

The new administration was at first given the mellifluous “National Peace and Order Maintaining Council”; a loop of patriotic military songs played over their logo. They seem to have let the French movie channel go through, perhaps because they didn’t understand it; more recently, they’re letting some more channels through but most international news is still blocked. Perhaps because someone told them that “National Peace and Order Maintaining Council” was not the best phrasing, the junta’s name has been changed to “National Council for Peace and Order”. The printed newspapers are heavily self-censoring: from the front page of a recent Bangkok Post (“The Newspaper You Can Trust”) you can’t really tell that there’s much going on here:

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Obviously the first thing that we did after there was a coup was to go to the beach. We were not trying to behave like the worst people in the world; however, we had already planned to go to the beach, and it seemed likely that the beach would be safer than Bangkok. So we went to Koh Samet (เกาะเสม็ด), which is an island off the coast of Rayong, where we’ve previously been to the beach. It is a confusing thing that somehow we have not been to any islands in Thailand, though we have gone to an island in Cambodia. Who knows? But a coup, we are learning, is a good time to make good for past behavior, so we started going to islands.

You may, it is possible, be familiar with Koh Samet from the poetry of Sunthorn Phu, who is the closest thing there is to a Thai national poet. Probably you are not familiar with Koh Samet from his poetry; if you are, doubtless you have better things to be doing than reading this.

There are a number of beaches that you can go to on Koh Samet; the one we went to was a little less touristed than ones that are more convenient. The sand is fine and white, the water is warm, and it was hard to tell the military had just taken over the country:

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Strictly speaking, there isn’t very much to do at Koh Samet, which is maybe the point of going to the beach. It’s a fine place for swimming:

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And junior boating:

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And adult boating: the technical term for the thing that looks like a hotdog is “banana boat”. Everyone sits on it and then the other boat goes very fast and the passengers try to avoid falling off.

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As is customary in these situations Harriet got a tattoo: a crude but effective rendition of Hello Kitty who took well over a week to rub off.

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After that we all went home. Life goes on under military rule.

Back to the Zoo

Posted on by Dan Visel

What is going on at the zoo? The last time we tried to go to the zoo we ran into a protest and couldn’t actually get to the entrance. This time there was a protest, but the driver managed to drive around it. The zoo was full of people, and there were a lot of water monitors to be found, but you will be happy to know that the Dusit Zoo is still red in tooth and claw.

Also, they seem to have brought in the world’s most boring dog show:

This continued for about twenty minutes. Some of us were entranced, and others of us were not entranced. The moral of this is that different people like different types of dog show.

Then we took a tuk-tuk back to the express boat and Harriet had a cucumber:

A Handful of Wats

Posted on by Dan Visel

We’re back in Bangkok and everyone is fine, the city is hotter than ever. Maybe it will rain soon? By going to India, we missed Songkran, the holiday where everyone dumps buckets of water over each other for a week in the hope that this will bring the rain. It has not thus far.

I’ve resumed my attempt to visit everything there is to see in the city, in particular the enormous number of wats. There doesn’t seem to be a particularly good guide to these; there’s plenty of information online, but it’s often of questionable validity especially when you start getting to the more minor wats.

Today, three wats which I visited while going to the electronics supply district where I was going for parts to improve the water pump. The first two are on different sides of the canal marking the border of Rattanakosin, the royal island – the pig shrine, seen previously, separates them.

Wat Ratchabophit was Rama V’s first wat, made in 1869. It has funny European door guards, suggesting the new openness of the country under the reigns of Rama IV and Rama V:

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Also it has faux-Gothic memorials to the royal family:

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And immediately adjacent more Khmer-looking ones:

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Somewhere in here are the remains of the father, mother, and older sister of the current king (and the previous king, his older brother), but I couldn’t find them.

The wat proper is beautifully detailed and enormous:

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Also it has some royal elephants with blankets made of flowers:

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Across the canal is the similarly named Wat Ratchapradit. What’s most notable about Wat Ratchapradit, built by Rama IV, is the chedi, which is covered in tiled gray marble:

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The guardians here are more traditional and Chinese:

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It’s a pleasant enough wat, but Rama V clearly outdid his father with Wat Ratchabophit.

I don’t know how we managed to miss the fact that there’s a crocodile wat near the river in Chinatown until now, but there you go. It’s called Wat Chakrawat. It’s a big complex, but one of the smaller buildings has a pair of ponds in the back with two fairly large crocodiles in them. This is not explained anywhere; the wat just has some crocodiles. Actually, it seemed to have four crocodiles, but one was stuffed and one was just a skull. These are displayed above the two crocodile enclosures, perhaps to remind them of their own mortality. In this picture, you can see the skull in the middle, the stuffed crocodile on the right, and the smaller live crocodile in the background, in the process of slowly going out the door:

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And here is the larger crocodile, kept behind some chicken wire:

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The internet suggests that the original crocodile who lived here (maybe the stuffed one?) had been menacing bathers in the Chao Praya so the monks moved him to the wat. Maybe the monks were bored and wanted a pet. A crocodile is not a good pet.