Hot and Quick!

This is about food, nothing else!

When we arrived back in Northern Thailand (my favorite), I wanted to go to the Central Plaza Lampang, a new mall that opened just after I left Thailand the last time. In many ways, Thailand is very different from the US, which is one of the reasons it is so much fun to visit. The exception to this is the malls in Thailand, which carry many of the same brands as the malls in America. If you get homesick, you can always go to a mall in Thailand and soon you'll be feeling like you're at the Glendale Galleria, except it isn't just the young girls who are thin, but nearly everyone.

Well there is one notable difference. The malls in Thailand have many small bank stores, making it easy for people to get access to their spending money, or to change their currency into spending money.

So we went and did some shopping. When it got to be about 5:00 pm, we were getting hungry and we went looking for some food. This mall doesn't just have a food court. On the third floor there is a restaurant row, with restaurant after restaurant side by side, on both sides, offering many different choices of cuisine: Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and many more, even a steak house. Oh yes, and both McDonald's and KFC, but I think they were relegated to the second floor.

We were leaning toward Japanese, as a change of pace from our usual Thai meals, and there were two choices of those, MK Restaurant and Yayoi. It was only later that I learned that these are large chains of restaurants, both owned by the same company. I don't remember the tipping point, but we settled on Yayoi. We found this review online only many days later.

We sat down at our booth. I love booths in restaurants, but that wasn't the tipping point. We started looking at the large menu, full of color pictures of many choices, and we learned that Yayoi is all about Hot and Quick! It is stated and restated many times in their menu that they will be delivering these delicious meals Hot and Quick! It quickly got to be a bit of a joke among us. After all, most fast food is hot and quick, but is it any good?

Soon a waiter appeared to take our order. The ladies pointed to the green tea in tall pitchers and said we better get that, so we ordered that to a nod from the waiter. The rest took longer because there were so many choices. I knew I wanted an order of Tempura and a salmon roll, but I wasn't sure about my main dish. The ladies made their choices and made some suggestions for my main entree.

Suddenly a young fellow arrives with a tray carrying our tea pitchers and starts pouring our glasses. We're still ordering and the drinks have arrived, without the waiter budging from his spot at the end of the table. I settle on my main dish, the waiter leaves and we begin to drink our very green tea. 

Within one minute, probably more like half that time, a waiter is delivering our first meal to the table. And so it goes. Within a few minutes, we're all eating our Hot and Quick meals. And pretty darn good too. Fast food is not something you write home about, but here I am, writing home about it!

As my stomach got fuller, my mind began to consider this Hot and Quick tagline. How did they pull this off and still have the food be very tasty? My eyes wandered over to a nearby booth where a waiter was taking another order. And then the light went on. He wasn't holding an order pad and pencil. He was holding a small device, like a smart phone.

You know, just like when you go into the Apple Store and all the clerk/geeks in blue shirts have small devices around their necks, which they begin to type on, if someone starts to order or has a question. 

The waiters had a direct connection to the kitchen! They could start cooking the first order while we were still deciding about the second order. That's how the green tea could arrive even before our order was complete. Hot and Quick. Brilliant!

I don't get out much back home. Is this already going on all over America? I had never seen it anywhere else. The United States doesn't hold a monopoly on innovation, now does it? In any case, if it isn't already, this system of ordering will likely be sweeping across America soon.

Three nights later we end up having dinner at MK Restaurant, but at a mall in Chainat, instead of Lampang. Their waiters all had the same hand held electronic devices for taking orders. They carry them in a little pouch on their belt and they use a stylus for entering the data. I got a brief look at one. They also show the total cost of the meal at the end, so the waiter was able to collect the money. No need to stand in line at the cash register.

Thailand Rain Storms

Yesterday we drove from about twenty minutes east of Lampang to Chainat, a distance of about 450 kilometers. It was sunny in most directions with occasional dark clouds off in the distance.

But we drove through two strong rain storms, the windshield wipers barely keeping up with the rain pounding onto the truck. Maybe we should pull over and wait it out? No, we keep going, because the sky is still sunny in most directions. And then as quickly as the rain had come, it ended, the windshield quickly dry in the heat again.

On the second rain storm, I decided to pay more attention to the details, glancing at the clock as the drops began to hit the windshield. The truck drove through the deluge for more than two minutes, but was all dry again in much less than three minutes. That's right, we drove through the rain storm in two to three minutes, a time span that was similar to the first rain storm!

The truck was going about 100 km/hr or about 1-2/3 km/minute. So the storm was about 3.5 km, certainly less than 5 km, wide.

Wikipedia says "a cloudburst is an extreme amount of precipitation, sometimes with hail and thunder, which normally lasts no longer than a few minutes but is capable of creating flood conditions. Colloquially, the term cloudburst may be used to describe any sudden heavy, brief, and usually unforecast rainfall." 

It would have been even more fun, if we had had some thunder. It was as though the gods finished a wash and dumped the entire contents of the full wash basin right out onto our truck below.


Two days later, while driving from Suphan Buri (City of Gold) to U-Thong, we saw what Thailand really has to offer when it comes to rain storms. 

This time the rain came as no surprise, we saw it coming from far away. If these clouds had appeared in Oklahoma, the storm trackers would have been lined up, watching for funnel clouds, but Thailand does not get tornadoes (nor earthquakes nor volcanic eruptions).

Once the rain started, it pounded hard for over ten minutes, with lighter rain for five more. While we were inside the rain, the sky was no longer black, instead everything was white around us. We discovered that visibility in the strong rain was actually enhanced by putting on our sunglasses! Once through the rain, we could see black clouds in the distance again as we arrived in U-Thong. We were getting thunder, but no rain, as we quickly unloaded the truck and brought our stuff inside the hotel. Before long the rain arrived in full force at the hotel and lasted much of the evening.

                                              Giant Storm Clouds Over the Rice Fields in Suphan Buri Province

Banana Chips

Thailand has better banana chips than the ones I've had in the US. The ones in America are flat, rather thick, and rectangular in shape. Thai banana chips are much thinner and curled into loops. They have a thickness similar to American potato chips and they crunch like them as you eat them. They are far more satisfying to eat as a snack than the fatter American banana chips.  

Fat - American
Thin - Thai

A Sticker For the Old Guy

We're back in the Land of Smiles, the ever surprising and amazing Thailand, posting at a new address, as the previous hosting service cashed out and its buyer chose not to continue hosting its blogs. No matter, I know the new location and apparently you do too. The previous postings have been moved over here and you may notice that the new hosting service does not compress images, as done by the previous service, so suddenly my pictures are much bigger.

Earlier today, a friend of mine from second grade on in the Midwest of the US gave me the dates for our upcoming high school reunion. I added it to my Google Calendar and then got to thinking about who might attend and what it might be like. Would the others believe that I had recently spent months in Thailand? No matter, I would have the photos to prove it.

My mind wandered to the graduation speech I gave so many years ago as the Salutatorian at our graduation. The reunion would give me the chance to apologize to my classmates. The three student speeches were centered around Robert Frost as a theme. Each of us was given a Frost poem as the starting point for our speech. I don't recall which straw I pulled, but I got "The Road Not Taken."

So I wrote a speech and our faculty advisor "suggested" a few edits, turning it into an insufferable speech, dividing our class into two groups: those who were going off to college and all its wonderful opportunities and those who would not go off to college, very thinly veiled as the losers. I should have said, "Hell no, I'm not gonna read that out loud!" But I didn't. I had not yet learned much about personal integrity.

It is my hope that most of my classmates were not paying attention to my insufferable speech much at all. None of them expressed any outrage or hurt from my words, so I might be right.

As it turns out, I got three useful things out of my $12,000 education at Oberlin College. I discovered the amazing music of Gustav Mahler, thanks to my first ever girl friend, who left me heart broken for the first time in my life, in the process presenting me with an LP of the brilliant "Das Lied von der Erde," which I still have today.

The second useful thing was a deep admiration and fascination with the art of Bob Dylan, who came into my life just in time to show me that life could be far more complicated than I had ever imagined in my high school days and earlier. He didn't give me solutions for my broken heart, but just got me looking at all the possibilities in a lifetime. It was a Cleveland radio station that played "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" one night in the fall of 1966 that first got my attention, and it was Stefanie Gutieri (RIP) who told me who "that singer" was, a bit incredulous when I said, "Who's Bob Dylan."

The third useful thing was something I got my freshman year, the ability to write in a decent way. I never would have taken the course, but it was required of all freshman. And I didn't realize until decades later that the teacher had pounded some useful skills into my mind, and it was many years after that when I discovered that I really enjoy writing. I've been doing more and more of it ever since.

The older I got, the more I found myself wondering just what matters in life. For most of my adult life, I concentrated on working, the expected role for a man in America. But as the possibility of retirement began to come into view, some new opportunities came into view. There was a fork in the road and I decided to take it.

I don't take anything for granted. Many of my dearest friends are no longer living in this lifetime with me. Get used to it, there is no other way out. Or is there? Now I'm spending a lot of time in Thailand, which is 95% Buddhist, and these people don't subscribe to the American beer company tagline that "you only go around once in life." I don't either, but somewhere along the way, I did decide to "grab for all the gusto."

This time I flew on Japan Airlines to Tokyo and then on to Bangkok. I was taking it all in, making notes in my Moleskin pocket notebook, and taking pictures of the food once we were underway. Near the end of the second flight, one of the lovely Japanese stewardesses gave me a great honor. She came up to me and told me she had noticed me making notes in my notebook, "perhaps a diary or journal." Because of that she wanted to give me something as a present from the airline.

It was a picture of the Boeing 777-200 airplane we were flying and she turned it over and explained to the old guy in 23G that it was a "sticker." Oh yes, it was a sticker! But not just any old sticker. The photo was of a Boeing 777-200 adorned with all the usual Japan Airlines logos, but MUCH more. This particular plane had the Disney characters all over its side and it was commemorating not only the plane and airline, but also the Tokyo Disney Resort in its 30th year, "The Happiness Year!"

Surely she had presented me with something that is given to youngsters on a flight most of the time. Perhaps in her mind, she saw that the old guy was totally engaged in the experience of our flight, alive and excited like a kid might be. I didn't see anyone else getting stickers on that flight. And yes, I was feeling quite alive and excited!!  

Chang Phuak Gate

This is the first picture I took on my trip to Thailand of a spot that would interest tourists. It simultaneously shows the old and the new, part of the old wall in Chiang Mai in the foreground, and my hotel rising up above it, with the top of the Ford dealership sign barely peaking above the wall. I was purposely getting a picture of both. The Buaraya Hotel was the only hotel on my trip that I booked myself. I selected it before I started on my journey and I chose it partly because of its location inside the boundaries of the ancient walled city. I have a lot to learn about the history of the Thai people and when I took this picture, I knew less than I know now. But somewhere before I came, I read that there were these ancient walls in Chiang Mai, so I wanted to be close to them. And I was. My hotel was right across the street from the moat which was orginally built to run alongside the ancient wall. 

It was built starting in 1296 (nearly two hundred years before Columbus landed in North America) to protect the Lanna Thai Empire from attack by their rivals to the north in Burma, centuries before Chiang Mai became part of the current Kingdom of Thailand. The brick wall formed a rectangle around the city which was 1.8 km wide by 2.0 km long. "Chiang" in the northern Thai dialect means "city," while "mai" means "new," hence Chiang Mai means New City. At that time it was probably called the new wall. More than seven hundred years later, it is the old wall around the old city and a tourist destination. 

Many cities in the US have an Old Town section, a good name for encouraging visits from tourists and those with money to spend. In the US, "old" can mean two hundred years or less. Not here. In Chiang Mai, "old" is more than seven hundred years, and in other parts of Thailand, it is centuries longer than that. When you look at it, it is quite obvious that it is old, really old. So we stopped the truck and got out, looking and taking pictures. Looking to the right we saw a fortified top to the wall at the end of the block.

On the other side of the wall at that corner was this gate, labeled with a bronze plaque, Chang Phauk Gate.
The plaque, written in Thai, English and ancient Lanna languages, offered an obvious photo opportunity.
I had no idea what Chang Phauk meant at the time. When I looked to find out, I found one misguided soul who thought Chang was a mis-spelling of Chiang. Well, no! As I found out less than an hour after these pictures were taken, Chang means elephant, animals of huge importance to the culture and people of Thailand. 

Phauk means white, so this is the White Elephant Gate. In American English a white elephant is a unique, but not so useful, object not easily disposed of. At our annual holiday party, the CPA firm used to make a game of giving a white elephant gift (cost under ten dollars) to another staff member, with rules about how they could steal someone else's gift to avoid taking the one you had given them.

Wikipedia says the phrase derives from the Thai culture. "The term derives from the story that the kings of Siam (now Thailand) were accustomed to make a present of one of these animals to courtiers who had rendered themselves obnoxious, in order to ruin the recipient by the cost of its maintenance."

There actually are albino elephants that are very white, or pink. They are very rare and long associated with the royalty in Thailand. Even today, the royal family in Thailand owns white elephants. And of course, elephants in general are regarded with considerable favor in Thailand and for good reason, as important as they have been in the history of the country.

There is a legend that the Chang Phauk Gate was given that name (originally Hua Wiang Gate) because the north end of the city was the head of the city and the king would enter the city through this gate on state occasions, riding on a white elephant. An albino elephant monument was also built on the north side. So this is a name of great honor, not with the connotation we have given the phrase back home.

Looking back toward the hotel from our spot in front of the gate, we got a look at the moat which used to be crossed on bamboo bridges, which were removed at night for extra protection.
Without knowing it at the time, I had begun my adventure in Thailand by settling in the most important north end of the old city and then began my explorations right where the king would make his grand entrance into the city, through the most important of the four gates. I didn't know about these significances at the time. But I DID feel considerable excitement that I was embarking upon an important new direction in my life, an adventure worthy of my time and attention.

Feasting in an Eclectic Decor

Okay, I looked. Bob Dylan has never used the word "eclectic" in one of his songs. Too snooty, maybe. Well anyway, there are no song lyrics for this article.

I mentioned in the last article that we had a nice lunch after eating the boiled peanuts. Well we did, but I would make a lousy restaurant critic, because I can't tell you the name of the place, or even it's exact location. All I can say is that it was on the left side of the highway just a bit after we first came into Chiang Rai. They had nice outdoor seating, but we went inside the glass door on the right side, the door that Por had just exited in this photograph.

The place had a really nice Thai soup with pork, which Ach loaded up with tons of hot peppers. I didn't add pepper, but enjoyed the soup very much anyway. But the decor of the restaurant is the point of this article. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I never knew what I'd find next in Thailand. Well this place is a good example. 

We sat down at a table in one corner near this Gorilla Rack shelving that had a TV that was on. No surprise there. You see TV's in Thai restaurants all the time. I think they had it on a news station. A lot of places you'd see a UK football game on. That means a soccer game from England for the American readers. Others might be running a Thai soap opera program, and you didn't need to know Thai to know that the guy was cheating on his wife with the younger woman and the shrieking woman throwing things was his wife.

But my eye went to the shelf below the TV which held the component stereo system, a cassette recorder and a reel-to-reel recorder. It's the reel-to-reel machine that really got me! And it had a tape on it, like they had just finished listening to something. Neat!

Next my eye was drawn to the lovely aquarium with the bubble machine blasting. From a distance that looks like it might be a big red betta fish, or a Siamese Fighting Fish, as we called them when I was a kid and I was big into tropical fish. After all, Siam is Thailand, and that's where those scary fish come from! But no, the red was a bright plant, or mock plant. On close examination we found that the tank had NO fish in it at all. Okay, maybe they had the day off.

Now our table was a normal table with normal legs and normal chairs. Unremarkable. But looking further to the left from the aquarium, the entire other corner of the room was taken up by this amazing collection of wood furniture, what we would call burlwood furniture back home.

It was all very highly polished and it looked like a great place to have a business lunch and impress that new client from Chiang Rai. On the back of the enormous chair in the back corner was a sign which read, "For Sale 150,000." That's right, that corner of the decor of this place was for sale, for 150,000 Baht, which is about $5,000 US. And that's a price that isn't out of line with the prices at the place in Berkeley.

Finally I turned my head around to look at the wall directly behind us. And there was the head of an animal with a nice rack of antlers. But look a little more closely, as we did. There were a couple of polished gourds hanging from the antlers. But wait, what are those two other things hanging there in front?

After looking them over, we decided they were bird's nests, and then they looked very cool to us! Maybe someone will come along who can tell us what kind of birds might have made them.

But something tells me that a website that focuses on American birds is not going to help identify those nests in Thailand. We didn't wonder too much about it. When you're exploring a land that is so different from your own, where you don't speak the language, you find yourself looking at new discoveries and just enjoying how they look, without needing a complete explanation of what you're seeing.


Food Was Flying Everywhere

Bob Dylan's 115th Dream 

by Bob Dylan

I went into a restaurant
Lookin' for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
The waitress he was handsome
He wore a powder blue cape
I ordered some suzette, I said
"Could you please make that crepe"
Just then the whole kitchen exploded
From boilin' fat
Food was flyiing everywhere
And I left without my hat

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One of my readers wrote, "Did you incur any bad effects from eating those exotic foods? I would worry about food poisoning."

Well, nice to have the question and I'm happy to give an answer. Before I went to Thailand, I was concerned about that too. When I got my shots for travel, they had a nurse whose specialty was travel medicine. So she gave me some advice about food, which I followed pretty closely. Here were the rules she gave me.

1.     Drink only bottled water.

2.     Don't have ice in your drinks, as they were likely made with the local water.

3.     Brush your teeth with bottled water.

4.     Only eat fresh fruit that you peel yourself.

5.     Don't eat food that would have been washed as it was prepared, such as lettuce.

6.     Don't eat eggs, unless the yolks are fully cooked.

7.     Any food that has just been cooked at a high temperature is safe to eat.

 8.     Because of that, rice, noodles and soups are always safe to eat.

All but the eggs rule were focused on things in the local water that my body might not tolerate. The eggs rule had to do with some bug that had been known to infect some poultry in Asia.

I stuck to those rules pretty well. When I first got there, I told Por what the doctor had said, since she was the one who would order and/or prepare most of the food we would eat. I quickly became known as the guy in our group who didn't want ice (though I really did, almost always), but I stuck with the program! And drinking bottled water was no problem, as it is available everywhere in Thailand, because of the heat, and after all, Por works for a company that sells bottled water. I was smart enough to always ask for Namthip (their brand), only accepting substitutes when it was not available.

Brushing my teeth with bottled water was just plain weird at first, but I soon got used to it and could do it with very little water after a while. I also had to learn not to open my mouth in the shower, something I found I was used to doing and missed be able to do. Let the shower water beat on your face, but keep those lips closed tight. Ugh!

The eggs rule was the hardest for me, as I was used to having two eggs sunny side up nearly every morning, with the yolks nice and runny, which I always felt was the best part. In fact they were the favorite part of my mornings. In Thailand I ate a lot of cooked yolks, scrambled eggs, eggs cooked in soup, and so on. Finally I began to weaken. When we went to Chiang Rai near the end of my fourth week, someone brought me a beautiful egg, sunny side up, at breakfast. We were at a very nice hotel. I looked both ways, crossed my fingers . . . and ate it. Oh, it was soooo good. Having sinned, I think I had one or two more after that. If you look at my article, Please Pass the Mums, you'll see that runny yolk.

Ice was a bit of a problem too. In the US, my favorite drink at a Thai restaurant is always Thai Iced Tea. There it is, right in the name of the drink! But I resolved to stick with the bottled water and mostly did, plus some hot tea, hot chocolate, milk, orange juice, bottled soft drinks, and bottled beer. With the beer I had to ask for no ice, as the Thais always have ice in their beer. And I would have too, if it weren't for that travel nurse.

But when we first started going on the road, I cheated inadvertently. Every morning we would drive for a while and then Por would stop at a gas station and go in to the Amazon coffee shop and get us both a nice cold drink. It was always one of those tall slushy drinks with green tea, never coffee, all whipped up nice and cold. I never saw them make it, as Por always got the drinks. But it was probably all blended with ice, right? The first time I had it, I thought that the tea would have been made with boiling water, so it would be okay. But no, dummy, once it's tea they had to dump it into a blender with ice to get that frosty slushy drink! Duh!

It was so good that I just kept having it, like nearly every morning that we were driving to a new town. I never had any bad effects from this violation of the rules, thank goodness.  So maybe I've created a new exception rule that says those drinks are okay.

So did it work, all my care in following the rules? Yes, at least for nearly all of the first four weeks. When we went to Pattaya for a weekend with three others, I chuckled to myself with some pride when I learned that two of the four Thais that weekend got diarrhea, and I didn't!

But my luck turned on 15 November 2012 when we made the all day drive from Bangkok back to the Lampang area. We stopped for lunch along the way and we had this food.

I loved the Hor Mok (on the blue plate and close-up), which is curried fish, steamed inside banana leaves. I had never had it and when I first started eating it, both Jackie and Por looked at me to see whether it would be too spicy for me. No problem, I loved it. It was my favorite part of the meal. There was a much spicier entree, but I passed on that one, as I always did with the super spicy stuff. This restaurant was also the first place we found that had Foy Thong for dessert, which we had been looking for ever since I had the Foy Thong in the home-made cream puff by the DPU campus in Bangkok. I was full of joy and confidence at the great lunch I was having!

We started on our way north again after lunch. I was full, happy, and carefree with my two friends as we headed off down the road. But fifteen minutes or so later, I realized it was time for a visit to a toilet. I told Jackie and he succeeded in finding facilities for me, just in time. What a relief that was. I thanked him profusely, totally thinking I was done with that little chore for the day.

Well I wasn't. When we finally reached Lampang many hours later, they told me we had stopped six times so I could use a toilet. And some of those times were just barely in time. Jackie was masterful in finding facilities on usually very short notice. Once we reached Lampang, Jackie and Por had a nice big dinner, a sort of celebration of the end of our long drive. I didn't dare put any more food into my body. The next day I mostly fasted, drank some Sprite and ate a little bit of yogurt. That evening we went to Por's family home, where she coaxed me to eat some soup, after telling me to lay off the milk products.

She also dumped a packet of orange colored salts into my bottled water, which she said would help with my dehydration from the diarrhea. AND her mother came to us with a tea cup that held six or seven plant leaves with instructions for me to eat them. Okay, I wasn't about to argue, so I chewed up the leaves and swallowed them, washing them down with the now orange colored water. The leaves tasted very bitter, but I got them down pretty fast and then they were just a memory. And then as Por was driving me back to my hotel in Lampang for the night, I realized I suddenly was feeling the best I had felt all day long! Before she returned to her family home for the night, I told her to tell her mother that the herbs she gave me had helped.

Okay,  well it could have been the orange salts in the water, I suppose. But wasn't it smarter to attribute it to the herbs? I think so!

The next morning we set off for Myanmar with a great couple from Lampang who are friends of Por (and now mine), also employees of Thainamthip. Along the way that morning, we stopped at a gas station and Por got her usual cold drink at the Amazon coffee shop. I was being cautious because we had quite a distance to drive and I didn't want any repeat performances from two days earlier, so I passed on the tea this time.

Por disappeared for a while as we were sitting outside the coffee place and talking. When she returned she had a bag of peanuts in the shell, which the others began to eat. Por encouraged me to try some. I'm thinking, "No! How easy are peanuts going to be to digest?!" But I watched them opening the shells and before long I took one that Por handed me. I opened it and looked down to see purple peanuts in the palm of my hand. What is this??? I popped them into my mouth and discovered they were soft, not crunchy, not salty, and tasted good, but more like potatoes than nuts!

proceeded to eat a lot more of them. They went down easy and it seemed like they would be easy to digest. I learned that they were boiled peanuts, not your usual salted ball park peanuts. I have now researched them some, discovering that they are fairly common in the South in the US. In fact, they were declared to be the snack food of South Carolina in 2006. I had never seen them in my life. I'm not sure they're quite the same as the boiled peanuts in the South, as discussions of those I found talk a lot about how spicy they get. These peanuts were not very spicy, if at all. I also don't know whether a street vendor had boiled them right there where she bought them or not.  

Once I ate those boiled peanuts, that was the end of my concerns about food. When we stopped for lunch a little later, I ate a nice big bowl of soup with pork and for the rest of my ten days in Thailand, I was back to normal with my eating.

So that one episode was my only difficulty with food in Thailand. So what did it? Was it the somewhat spicy Hor Mhok? I guess I'll never know. At the time my attention went more onto the Foy Thong. There seemed to be a lot of it and it was pretty rich. We took some as an order to go when we left, along with orders of the related desserts, Thong Yip and Thong Yod. I never ate any of those orders.

One final note about eating Thai food for five weeks. In the US, I weigh myself every morning when I get up. I like to be able to spot it right away if I start to put on some weight, before it gets out of hand. Well in Thailand I rarely saw a scale, so I wasn't able to follow this practice. But I figured I was eating very healthy foods, so I should be okay.

was right. In the week before I went to Thailand, I was weighing around 185-186 pounds. While in Thailand, I made no effort to diet or limit my intake of food. I ate as much as I wanted at every meal. I almost always had a large breakfast, often no lunch to speak of and usually a large dinner. In the over two weeks that I've been back, my weight has been a very stable 184-185 pounds.

Things Go Better With Coke

I found there are advantages to traveling in Thailand in Thainamthip circles, the company that bottles and distributes Coke, Sprite, Fanta and other drinks in Thailand.

Most important, the employees I got to know from this company (over ten) were all friendly, welcoming, fun-loving people and the great camaraderie amongst them was evident and pleasing. Now, is there anything more American than Coca-Cola? Maybe not, but Coke has had a strong presence in Thailand since 1949.  This Life Magazine photograph from its earliest days in the country is one of my favorite images, with its pairing of the exotic Thailand and the legendary American label.

This image shows a lot of what I experienced in Thailand, a country that has developed and maintains its own distinctive culture over many centuries, but now accepts and enjoys many things from America and the West, including the great taste of Coke.

If you hang out with employees of Thainamthip, one day you're likely to enjoy receiving gifts of things sporting the classic Coca-Cola trademark, surely one of the most famous marks anywhere in the world.

A Coca-Cola collector, and I gather there are many of those, would do well to develop friendships with the folks from Thainamthip!

One day as I was riding to the very northernmost point in Thailand with three friends from Thainamthip, I suddenly got a chance to feel like one of the fold. Up ahead on the highway, I spotted a large Coca-Cola truck stopped on the side of the road, which I immediately pointed out  to the others with me.  What was neat was that Nop, who was driving our truck, pulled over when we reached the truck, as he recognized that the driver of the truck was a friend of his. He jumped out and walked over to have a chat with his friend and I jumped out and got a video of the truck, in fact two trucks from Thainamthip.

Later on after we had stopped at a gas station for some Thai tea and boiled peanuts, we passed the truck again, as it was lumbering north toward its destination in Chiang Rai. Nop honked the horn and we all waved to the driver, who now almost seemed like another one of the family to me.

As I reflect on this connection we made, it occurred to me that one might be able to estimate when a person was growing up by finding out what Coca-Cola slogan comes to mind for them. For me, it was Things Go Better With Coke, which was apparently first used in 1963.

And what better pairing than that slogan with the great American singer, Roy Orbison?



This Wheel's on Fire

This Wheel's on Fire 

by Bob Dylan

You knew that we would meet again
If your mem’ry served you well
This wheel’s on fire
Rolling down the road
Best notify my next of kin
This wheel shall explode!

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This is the first photograph I ever took in Thailand, one of nearly 1,600. It is a picture of  a songthaew, in Thai: สองแถว, meaning literally "two rows." The two rows are two long benches that run the length of the back of the converted pickup truck on which the passengers in this shared bus sit. This one was picking up people at the Chiang Mai airport, so it was also outfitted to carry luggage on the top to the hotels of the travelers in the back of the bus. These red buses were everywhere in Chiang Mai, a type of vehicle I had never seen in my life, but I never had a need, nor the pleasure, of riding in one. Next time I return to Thailand, I will make a point of going somewhere in a songthaew.

I got to my hotel just before midnight in this familiar looking taxi. The woman in the dark suit had collected my taxi fare, hailed the taxi for me and was about to open the door to let me inside. I told the driver the name of my hotel, which he recognized, and we were soon off to my first night's sleep in a new country. The fare was 120 Baht, about $4 US. 

The next afternoon, I saw the vehicle that I would ride all over Thailand, a six month old Isuzu D-Max pickup truck with a four door extended cab. The front had two comfortable and roomy seats, with a long bench seat running across the back. The truck had plenty of power, an air conditioning system that worked great in the hot weather and a stereo that sounded fine. The back seat held all of our luggage, easily accessible through its separate doors. These trucks are seen a lot in Thailand, perhaps because they are assembled in Rayong, Thailand. How fortunate I was to be able to see Thailand with such great transportation!

This was not a rental vehicle. It belongs to my friend, a supervisor of marketing and surveys, and a nineteen year veteran at Thainamthip [ ], the company that bottles and distributes Coke, Sprite and other American soft drinks in Thailand. As part of her job, she travels all over her territory in Thailand, surveying the outlets that sell their product, supervising the others on her team, and regularly meeting with the supervisors of other territories at the company office in Krung Thep. I was going to have the pleasure of riding along with her as she went from town to town as part of her work duties. This was not going to be a tour of Thailand designed for thirty tourists to hit all the hot spots where they could buy souvenirs for all their friends back home. I was going to get a personalized close-up look at Thailand, many of the great tourist spots, but a lot of other places as well, that are more off the beaten path, but just as exciting, or more at times.

On the day I first saw the truck, I knew I was about to start an amazing adventure in a land very different from my native America. But I didn't yet grasp what an amazing opportunity this would be to discover Thailand, to get to know my friend better, and to get to know many other Thai people, most of them also affiliated with Thainamthip.

The truck was practically new, but we still stopped at the Isuzu dealer in Singburi to get a routine servicing. We never had any trouble of any kind with the truck, a very wise purchase by my friend. 

When we were in Bangkok (Thai people don't say that name, they use the Thai name, pronounced About this sound Krung Thep ) four of us had a ride in this tuk-tuk, a three wheel vehicle with a small two-cycle engine that is very common in the congested urban areas of Thailand, as it can fit through tight spots where a regular taxi cannot pass. As we sped around a corner to the right, I was feeling like we were cartoon characters, chasing or being chased, with the tuk-tuk tipped up on two of its three wheels, the small engine screaming at the top of its power curve, as we all shouted, "Wheeeee, wheeeee!"

After reaching our destination, the driver was very willing to pose for pictures with the pleased American, who was feeling like he had just completed a roller coaster ride at the county fair. The three Thai women stood nearby and watched, pleased that their visitor seemed to be enjoying himself in their land.

Here is another Thai taxi, that can fit in even tighter spots than the tuk-tuk, a motorcyle taxi.
Take a good look at this image. A young Thai woman dressed impeccably in a skirt, sitting side saddle with no helmet, one foot on the cycle, the other dangling free, her hands holding her shopping bag, rather than gripping the bike itself. To a Californian this is an unusual sight, as in California a woman on the back of a cycle is more likely to be wearing jeans, a leather jacket and a helmet, holding on tight and certainly not sitting side saddle. In Thailand this is a very common sight. Near the DPU Place Hotel, I watched many young ladies arriving for classes at the university on motorcycle taxis, sliding off the back from their side saddle positions, handing the driver some money and off to campus on foot, no relief showing from surviving a harrowing experience, just an impassive look of routine and no worries.

As in California, helmets are required on motorcycles by law, but more than half the time I saw people on motorcycles with no helmets on their heads. Taxi drivers always wear an orange or red vest with their taxi number on the back.

Motorcycles are everywhere in Thailand. In this posting I'll just discuss their use as public transportation. No, I never hopped on a motorcycle taxi for a ride anywhere. The idea crossed my mind very briefly one day, but I quickly decided to just keep walking. No regrets!

When my visit was nearly over, I got to take a long ride in this horse and buggy in Lampang, the only town in Thailand that still offers this as a routine mode of transportation, though probably for tourists in most cases. It doesn't careen around any corners like the tuk-tuk, but it's a great way to see the business district of this lovely town in Northern Thailand, as you trot along at a comfortable speed very close to the fronts of all the shops and businesses. We negotiated a 200 Baht trip (under $7 US) in which the driver took us to visit a centuries old teak home/museum, parked and waited while we explored it at our leisure, and then drove us around the main business district of Lampang, about a forty-five minute ride. Our parked truck can be seen near the very end of this video. 

Finally, one will get the closest view of Thailand by walking. I did that about ten times, walking about twenty miles total. You never know what you might see when you're on the ground in this amazing, colorful country.

Pagoda in reflecting pool, campus of  Dhurakij Pundit University  
Statue in front of the DPU Cultural Center at Dhurakij Pundit University
Cell tower in a neighborhood in U-Thong, Thailand
Old pole house on a country road in Mae Moh, Thailand 

The Vandals Took the Handles

When I saw this antique water pump at The Grand Amezon Hotel and Resort in Lampang, Thailand the Dylan line from his ground breaking 1965 song immediately reverberated through my mind. 

Subterranean Homesick Blues 

by Bob Dylan

Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don’t wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles

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Fortunately they had located a handle for the other pump to the right of the first one.