Bike Ride to Hang Dong 2 - Furniture World

[Tuesday, February 24, 2009, 10pm Thai time]

Lots happening, way behind blogging. Let me finish the bike trip from last Saturday. We arrived in Hang Dong about 12:30pm and there was a huge furniture store so we stopped to look around. When I say "store" it certainly wasn't like a furniture store in Anchorage or elsewhere in the US. It was mostly very open buildings and a lot of stuff was actually outside. It was really more like a museum.We parked our bikes next to the Chinese room and as we walked around a delightful woman discretely began talking to us, explaining what we were looking at.
And inviting us to see other parts. Soon she was back with a tray and a couple of cold sealed cups of water.


At this point, seeing the whole front - India now - I was overwhelmed at the kinds of stuff they had.

There was door after door after door. These two are Chinese, and these are the insides. There were Indian doors and Pakistani doors as well. Not to mention windows. Part of me is wondering whether these are from places that were demolished for high rises or whether they just bought them off of people's houses.

If I were a US interior decorator, I'd spend a lot of time in Hang Dong and simply convince my clients that the wait was well worth what you got. Things weren't not terribly expensive at all. Some of the elaborate Indian doors - not those above - she said were 27,000 Baht - about $755. You could pay that much for a door at Home Depot and not get anything nearly as exciting as these. Of course, the catch is the shipping costs. We didn't get into that since I wasn't buying a door.

Here was a small display under a corrugated steel roof of how you might furnish your room. If we had a room that big.

These men are guarding the Burmese room.

And then there was the room of mostly Indian lamps. Here's is where we broke down. Two small hanging lamp shades for over our dining room table. They assured us they'd pack them so they wouldn't break and we could carry them on to the plane But even if we didn't carry them on they wouldn't break. We'll figure this all out when we get home. Will the work over the dining room table? We'll see.

These are Pakistani beds. There were lots and lots of them.

Here's our host. She apologized that she couldn't speak English - her parents were very poor and couldn't afford school for her beyond a couple of years. But she was so charming and such a great host - very Thai in that regard. As you can guess, this place covered a lot of land.

Bathroom sink anyone? The water worked.

And there were little things too, like drawer pulls, door handles, hat and clothes hooks, and things I wasn't sure about. We bought some drawer pulls too. I have no idea what we're going to do with them, but we'll figures something out.


Here is part of the front of the store that faces the street. As you can see, this place is called the Golden Triangle and you can visit their website yourself. And order an Indian door or a Chinese door, or maybe have a Thai door made. My guess is that most of the website is the Chiang Mai store, not the Hang Dong. As you can see it is a little slicker presentation than here. And while she didn't teach me the pricing code on the stickers until we were in the last room we looked at, the prices she did quote me seemed to be much less than what is on the website. If you were really going to buy a few large items, you could pay for your trip to Thailand and more in the savings you'd get. And the selection is sooooooo much greater.

After the Golden Triangle, we were overloaded. We rode our bikes a little way, but stopped for lunch where we saw the Elvis and the King picture. This was on a street that turned off from the main road and was furniture store after beautiful furniture store. I'm not sure how far it went. Our host had suggested we ride out to a place called Baan Tawai that was 3 km away. We'd had our quota of furniture for the day, but I can imagine there were stores the whole way. Not sure though. There was a whole complex of buildings - most still empty - that looked like it was going to be a furniture store city. Above I peeked into a lamp store that wasn't open.

Here you can see just a small glimpse of this newly built set of shops - as far as the eye could see in the picture - most still empty.

And I couldn't help but take this picture of the exquisity wood doors on this brand new - well I'm guessing it's a house - in the middle of this area with all the storefronts. Well, on second thought, maybe those doors open up into a store, with the house on top. As I say, this would be an interior decorators dream trip.

Now, let's talk about beauty and consumption. We are in a phase of our lives when we are trying to get rid of things, not take in new things. We aren't the sort of people who economists say make the economy work. And I think we have to have a new level of equilibrium in our economy so that we don't keep wasting so many resources just to package the things we buy, let alone the resources for the things themselves. We try to limit our purchases to things that have practical use, that we need, and that bring aesthetic pleasure. I think beautiful things are probably calming. But we want things that are seriously beautiful and will continue to bring that satisfaction for years and years. So, our temporary fix of a dining room lamp, a Japanese paper globe that has some tears in it now, is in need of replacement. So the two lampshades, theoretically, are a purchase that has a practical use and one that we have a need for. Whether we will be able to get enough light inside these lampshades and then out into the room is another questions. But for us this was like walking through a museum of of beautiful pieces of art, pieces that also happened to have price tags.

We biked back to the Golden Triangle, picked up our purchases, crossed the street and hailed a yellow song thaew. The driver got out, climbed up to the roof, untied the giant bungee cord, and I passed up the two bikes and he put them in place and tied them down. In 20 minutes we were in downtown Chiang Mai, and biked the rest of the way home.

Checkered Swan at the Stevens Trial?

[Monday, Feb. 23, 2oo9, 12:12 am Thai time]

Suppose you were at Potter Marsh last summer and you saw the bird above. You might say, "Hey, look, there's a swan." We don't see swans every day, but they do pass through Potter Marsh regularly and it makes sense when we see them there. But suppose you saw the next scene.


"Whoa!" you might say, "A black swan, here in Alaska? What's going on?" We know there are black swans - even if we didn't take philosophy - but in Alaska? You start scratching your head - this is unusual, but it's possible. But suppose you see the next bird.




"Hey, I know that black swans exist, but this just can't be."

When watching the Ted Stevens trial from afar, there are two situations that cause me to react as though I'm seeing a black, or even a checkered, swan - that is, things that cause me to take special notice and say, "Something isn't right."

1. Prosecution Bungling
   
   Four prosecution attorneys have been found in contempt of court by Judge Sullivan. (One was later excused since he'd just begun to work on the case.) As Cliff Groh, an Alaskan attorney who attended the trial wrote on his blog

   . . . today’s action is both a very big deal and another sign of [Judge Sullivan's] fury at the prosecutor’s conduct. As the Associated Press and the Washington Times reported, it is unusual for a judge to hold a prosecutor in contempt and very unusual to hold a federal prosecutor in contempt.

   
   This follows a series of screwups by the Prosecution regarding information withheld and for which they were scolded by the judge.
   
   OK, so attorneys can make mistakes. But hold on. In the three previous trials of Alaskan politicians held in Anchorage that have come from the same FBI investigation, the four Prosecuting attorneys were on top of every detail. They knew every fact and only occasionally had to look up the number of an exhibit even.
   
   But when the venue for the Stevens trial was set for Washington, DC, not Alaska, it came with a new lead Prosecutor, Brenda Morris, and apparently closer oversight from the Public Integrity Section (PIN) of the Justice Department, where the cases have been based. (Two of the attorneys at the Alaska trials - Nicholas Marsh and Andrew Sullivan - were from PIN and the other two were Alaska Federal Prosecutors Joseph Bottini and James Goeke.) The attorneys ruled in contempt include the new lead prosecutor Brenda Morris who is also the Deputy Director of PIN and PIN Director William Welch, but NOT the four attorneys who got the three convictions in Alaska.
   
   And then we get the announcement last week that the whole Prosecution team has been replaced - even the four attorneys who have been working these cases for several years and know all the details and were NOT ruled in contempt of court - by

   Paul O'Brien, chief of the Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section, David Jaffe, deputy chief of the Domestic Security Section, and William Stuckwisch, senior trial attorney in the Fraud Section.

   The defendant has been convicted after years of work in developing the case. And now we have three new attorneys brought in to finish the trial in the 11th inning? Relief pitchers with a fresh arm work in baseball, but relief attorneys? Maybe they don't need to know all the details of the case, they just have to clean up the questions of why the Prosecution's mishandling shouldn't lead to a mistrial. But getting rid of all the attorneys who know about the trial?
   
   
2. FBI Agent files complaint against lead FBI agent in Alaska investigation
   
   FBI Special Agent Chad Joy filed a complaint against the lead agent in this investigation Mary Beth Kepner. I've put up several extensive posts analyzing the claims in Joy's complaints - Let's Get Real and What Does the Internal FBI Complaint Tell Us? You can see the second, less redacted version of Joy's complaint here. The Anchorage Daily News just recently published Richard Mauer and Lisa Demer's "Key Players Contest FBI Whistle-blower Allegations" confirming the suspicions I raised about Joy's complaint.
   
   The black swan here, maybe even the checkered swan, is that Joy even filed the complaint in the first place. As I've discussed in a previous post, law enforcement officers tend not to squeal on their colleagues. While I questioned the use of the term Code of Silence because it suggests some level of honor, I found plenty of evidence that law enforcement officers often cover for their colleagues even when they are committing serious crimes that compromise their mission.
   
   It's odd enough that Joy would file a complaint. What pushes this from black swan to checkered swan territory for me is the fact that none of Joy's complaints about Kepner are about clear, serious transgressions that are routinely covered up - like abusing suspects, taking bribes, or using drugs on the job. These were mostly administrative discretion judgment calls - did Kepner share too much information with undercover sources, and things like that.
   
   Why would he file a complaint about things like that? I hazarded a guess that perhaps he was excessively rule oriented and the Mauer/Demer piece does say he was brought in to the case because he was good with numbers. But it is still very bizarre for a rookie agent to file against a 17 year veteran over discretionary calls.
   

So how do we explain these black swans at Potter Marsh and possibly even a checkered swan sighting? Behavioral psychologists explain behavior by looking at what reinforces that behavior. Economists use their own term - incentives. So what are the incentives here? Who benefits from the clouds over the FBI investigation and the Prosecution team meltdown?

1. The most obvious incentive for the Defense here is to get Stevens' conviction dismissed and have a new trial, or better yet, no new trial.
   
   
2. Another incentive for Stevens is to prevent the indictment and trial of his son, Ben Stevens, who has been one of the targets of the investigation and whom many think is the next in line to be tried.
   

By creating the appearance that the FBI investigation was corrupted and that the Prosecutors have illegally and intentionally mishandled evidence and witnesses in order to get their conviction of Stevens, the Stevens Defense team could possibly pull off both those goals.

We know that Stevens is a fierce competitor. He's famous for his Incredible Hulk tie and his corresponding temper. He's been known as Senator for Life long enough now that he clearly sees any question about his actions as an unwarranted personal attack. He feels he's innocent, and presumably wants to also protect his 'innocent' son. The Huffington Post reported after the conviction

Unbowed, even defiant, Stevens accused prosecutors of blatant misconduct and said, "I will fight this unjust verdict with every ounce of energy I have."

We also know that the Bush Administration Justice Department Republicans were not a single unified group.

[T[he firing of eight Republican U.S. attorneys last Dec. 7 [2006], in an episode that some of its victims have already taken to calling the "Pearl Harbor Day Massacre

by the Republican Bush Administration was one sign.

More related to the Stevens case was the appointment of Alaska Federal Prosecutor Nelson Cohen in 2006. Normally, when an Alaska Prosecutor is appointed by the Justice Department, the Alaska delegation is consulted. But not in 2006. The FBI investigation into Alaska political corruption was about two years old already and Ben Stevens, if not Ted Stevens too, were known to be targets. Clearly, there were Republicans who were not averse to taking on the senior Republican US Senator and they had enough clout to get this appointment made behind Senator Stevens' (and Senator Murkowski's) back.

"I am just furious at the way the attorney general handled this," the aide quoted Stevens as saying.

But a former Alaska U.S. attorney, Mike Spaan, now in private practice here, said he believes Cohen has a strong background in Alaska and is a "top-notch guy."

"I am confident Nelson knows Alaska. I'm not remotely upset about it," Spaan said. From Richard Mauer's ADN article.

But battles are won and lost in a war. Is the Stevens trial one more of those battles? Is it possible that some pro-Stevens folks got into the Prosecution team and helped disrupt the previously well oiled machine that got the Alaska convictions? Did the Defense get hints of Joy's discontent and find ways to push him into the extraordinary move of filing a formal complaint over such ambiguous issues?

There are, of course, other explanations for the black swan we see. Brenda Morris, perhaps, just wasn't capable of handling the case. Perhaps she was called to head the prosecution because they thought an African-American female leading the prosecution before a mostly female and African-American jury would be a good move. Perhaps the high-powered, well paid Stevens Defense team was a more formidable foe for the Prosecution than what the Prosecutors faced in Alaska.

Perhaps Chad Joy was just compulsive about the rules and in his eyes, Kepner had crossed the line once too often, and/or working for a highly successful, female boss was just too much for him.

One of the issues here - the Prosecution bungling and Joy's complaint - might have been like seeing a black swan at Potter Marsh. Highly unusual, but possible. But both the extreme Prosecution mishandling together with the rookie FBI agent squealing on his senior partner happening on a case of this level pushes this into the checkered swan category for me. Something is fishy. Both of these together didn't just happen. This didn't just fall into the Defense's lap.

My guess is that there's more to this. Joy's complaint alone, by a rookie FBI agent against a 17 year veteran over issues of administrative discretion - is like seeing a checkered swan. I don't see this happening without people intentionally working to pull this case apart from the inside.

David Whitney, in an August 8, 1994 ADN article, quotes Stevens on how Stevens lobbied (you may need UAA id for this link) for Alaskan statehood:

"I had made a study on each member of the Senate and this goes on now into '57, '58 whether they were Rotarians or Kiwanians or Catholics or Baptists and veterans or loggers, the whole thing," Stevens said in the 1977 interview.

"And we'd assigned these Alaskans to go talk to individual members of the Senate and split them down on the basis of people that had something in common with them," he said.

"We were violating the law . . . we were lobbying from the executive branch, and there's been a statute against that for a long time," Stevens said. "We more or less, I would say, masterminded the House and Senate attack from the executive branch."

What was to stop Stevens or his supporters now from studying each member of the FBI and Prosecution team and trying to find a crack the way he did in the statehood lobbying campaign? He certainly had a bigger personal stake now than in the statehood battle. And he didn't seem very contrite over breaking the law in the interview. Perhaps Joy was one of those cracks. And perhaps there were people willing to help in the Justice Department. I have no evidence to prove any of this, except the appearance of a couple of black swans, maybe even a checkered swan, that call for some sort of explanation.

We've been reluctant to question the motives of people like Stevens for years. But we've had a couple years of events that suggest that caution was misplaced. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but it wouldn't hurt, at this point, to check it out. And I'm sure that the people on the inside, people whose case has been fouled, have a lot of ideas about what might have happened.

Bike Ride to Hang Dong 1

Yesterday, we took a leisurely bike ride to Hang Dong south of Chiang Mai about 15 km if you go directly on the main road. I've driven by there a few times on trips with work to villages, but never had a chance to stop. The weather's gotten warmer in the last week and so we decided to go before it gets too hot at all. I don't think we achieved the second goal. The weather was in the mid 90s yesterday. My inernal thermostat seems to have adjusted well. We weren't totally sure how to get there - the maps are a little vague unless you take the main highway. We wanted to start along the canal road which is near us and has much less traffic. So, it was a time of discovery.




We helped an Israeli, who stopped us near my office, to get to the main road where he could catch a song thaew, then rode on past Wat Ramphoeng which is as far down that way I've been.







We passed through a little village, where we stopped for some bottles of cold water, then past a huge sports field then found ourselves out on the canal road.











I've passed this strange building several times in a car. We were on the other side of he canal so we didn't have a chance to figure out what it was.




We made it down to the local neighborhood market where we took the opportunity to get in the shade. J got an iced tea at this stand and I chose a strawberry smoothie.








While waiting for my smoothie I snapped this shot of brown rice. The top price is per liter, the bottom price per kilo. One dollar equals almost 36 baht these days.







We'd been vaguely hoping to find the University of Chiang Mai's Agricultural Campus which I'd been told was a nice place to bike, but we ended up on the main road too soon. But we did find a part of it and went in to check out some of the animals. When I approached the ostriches, they all came over - thinking, I guess, I had food. The deer already had food so didn't pay attention to me. But the whole flock of sheep came over to see me from out in the field. You can see that the hazy season is back. You can barely make out the mountains in the background.




Biking limits how far you can go, but it also means you see a lot more in the places you do go by. This place was growing lots of different types of trees, presumably they are for sale.









And, of course, on a bike, it is much easier to stop at the ice cream stand - well this one was a side car on a motorcycle - and have some home made ice cream. The ice cream man told us we could cut over on the road over the bridge and get into Hang Dong on more rural roads, which we did. I'll post our adventure in Furniture World later.

[Sunday, Feb. 22 (Happy Birthday George), 2009, 11 am Thai time] When I saw Slumdog Millionaire, I posted that I liked the movie, but it was basically Hollywood formula and glitz in a new setting. I was also concerned that the movie didn't really convey the complexity and richness of the Mumbai slums. I wrote:

Gregory David Roberts, for example in his book Shantaram seems to capture some of the spirit of the Bombay slums. He makes us feel its oppression, but also to see that despite what looks totally unlivable from a Western perspective, the inhabitants, like everyone else, live rich lives with joys as well as suffering.

A NY Times article today on protests in Mumbai against using the word slum in the movie, does a much more thorough job describing that these 'slums' are really very vibrant communities. Here's an excerpt - go to the link for the rest:

Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million “eyes on the street,” to use Jane Jacobs’s phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city.

Dharavi is all about such resourcefulness. Over 60 years ago, it started off as a small village in the marshlands and grew, with no government support, to become a million-dollar economic miracle providing food to Mumbai and exporting crafts and manufactured goods to places as far away as Sweden.

Certainly the movie brings much more attention to the situation and perhaps more people will actually be moved to find out more about this huge city within a city.

I see that I used both Bombay and Mumbai. The later is the new name for the city, but many, still use the older name.

Updating My Alaska Blog List

When I first starting blogging and only three or four people a day (counting my mother) were looking at my blog, I checked out posts on how to increase readership. One way that everyone recommended was to trade links with other bloggers.

But I really didn't want to have long lists of bloggers I didn't read or really care about just to get them to put my link up on their blogs.

Some time ago, I posted about Alaska blogs I liked. But didn't get around to putting them all up. Then Blogger offered a widget that put the blog list in order of the most recent post and allowed the reader to see the title of the newest post. I could see the benefit of that approach by the traffic it brought to my blog from other bloggers who used that widget - thanks especially to Immoral Minority for the links from there.

But there are way too many Alaska blogs to list them all. So my approach was to keep the list relatively short by doing the ones I really like a lot, and to leave off the blogs that are already on everyone else's lists (except those I had up before they were 'famous'.)

Then I saw that the blogger widget also let's me limit how many blogs with titles of their latest posts are on the list. So today I added about half a dozen links, but limited the total number to ten. So, only the ten blogs with the most recent posts will be showing. That means the blogs whose last post was three weeks ago probably won't be on the list.

It also means that the links I had to Alaskarants,Alaska Blogs, and Globe of Blogs, which are not blogs, but lists of blogs, won't show up at all because they don't have any latest posts.

When the King of Rock and Roll met the King of Thailand

[Update October 13, 2016: The King died today. My post today includes a picture of him I took at the Royal Ploughing Ceremony in 1969 and a few other pictures and thoughts.]



The King of Thailand was 7 years old when Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935. Today in a restaurant in Hang Dong, a district of Chiang Mai, there was a picture on the wall of the King and Queen of Thailand meeting Elvis Presley in the Buddhist year 2503 during the filming of GI Blues. (It's currently 2552 so that was 49 years ago, or 1960.) Elvis was 25 and the King was 32.



That also means that today, when the King is 81, Elvis would be 74



This is the coffee shop/restaurant where the picture was hanging on the wall.

Google provided a bit more background. Eric, on Ajarnforum (teacherforum) wrote a couple of years ago:

HM King of Thailand meets the King of Rock & Roll
I had read that His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit had met Elvis Presley at Paramount Studios, on the set of one of his movies, in June 1960. Apparently Duke Ellington was also present. HMK was 32 years old at the time and had just begun the 10th year of his reign.
After much scouring of the internet and eventually sending a guy $3 USD via PayPal I came up with this pic: [I couldn't open the link to the picture, but presumably it is the same one.)

Poking further I found this Youtube Thai television newscast of the event posted by Trevormeech. The newscast puts the date at May 21, 1960.

How Things Get Misconstrued - Setting the Record Straight

[Sat. Feb. 21, 2009, 8:15pm Thai time]
For the record, Steve Aufrecht is NOT investigating the terms of the BP-ARCO charter agreement with the university. At best, he's been poking around the subject. (For those of you wondering about the use of the 3rd person, while I'm not hiding my identity here, I'm also not trying to advertise it either.)

I got an email today telling me about this opinion piece in the ADN by history professor Steve Haycox. He's discussing Rep. Anna Fairclough's questions to University President Mark Hamilton regarding UA student lobbying and their opposition to development in Alaska. In it he writes:

His [Hamilton's] response is most welcome, for there have been questions raised recently about sanctions against respected university researchers who have produced reports critical of sacred cows. Biologist Rick Steiner criticized a Sea Grant initiative on offshore oil development; emeritus professor Steve Aufrecht is investigating the terms of the BP-ARCO charter agreement with the university.

I just want to set the record straight here. There's an implication: "questions have been raised recently about sanctions against respected university researchers." Then two university faculty are mentioned. First, as I said above, Steve Aufrecht has blogged about and raised some questions, but really has done nothing that he would claim to be 'investigating.' Second, to my knowledge, sanctions have not been discussed about him. I could be wrong on that score, but what sort of sanctions does one impose on faculty emerita? (From the University [of Alaska] Regulations 04.04.070: "the position of professor emeritus is the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a retiring faculty member. ")

So, how did Dr. Haycox come to these conclusions? My guess is that "there have been questions raised" refers to Philip Munger's post on his blog Progressive Alaska where he first discusses how Dr. Rick Steiner's signing of an open letter critical of the "North Aleutian Basin Energy-Fisheries Initiative, being implemented by the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) and Alaska Sea Grant" resulted in his Dean chastising him in a three year post-tenure review for abusing his academic freedom.

Then, Munger raises another issue of interest to the university. He writes:

2. Dr. Steve Aufrecht's Investigation into the BP-ARCO Merger Charter Agreement and the University of Alaska

University of Alaska Professor Emeritus Steve Aufrecht has been trying to determine whether or not the so-called "Merger Charter Agreement" that enabled the formation of the entity now known as Conoco-Phillips is legally enforceable, or is a mere scrap of paper. If the agreement is enforceable, it appears quite likely that Conoco-Phillips owes the University of Alaska money. A lot of money.

I had considered commenting on this post to say that 'investigation' was probably a bit strong. Two blog posts and some inquiries, the way I see things, do not an investigation make. But since the rest of the post described what little had been actually done in this 'investigation' I decided to let it pass. (As I look at it again now, I'd say that I was reasonably sure it is enforceable and what I'd been asking was who was monitoring it to be sure the conditions were met.)

But now Haycox picks up the word investigation and lumps the two profs together to suggest that both face sanctions for their activities, when really only Steiner did according to Munger.

Many of us played a game as kids, where one person is given a short phrase to pass on to the next person and that person passes it on to the next, then the next, and the next for five or six more people. At the end, the phrase that the last person tells the group is often totally unrecognizable from the one that was given to the first person.

Here, a couple of blog posts and inquiries become an 'investigation.' And by not reading quite carefully enough, two people get lumped into the same category, though they really aren't. And people reading the opinion piece will come away with something else altogether.

And that's why I try to be really, really careful when I write, when I choose my words. And even if I were 100% successful in writing clearly - don't worry, not even close - everyone comes to a story with their own preconceptions and so they see what they want or expect to see. But I don't want to help them by using vague or misleading language.

Two Different Nights, Two very Different Dinners

Thursday night J's Thai class had it's final dinner. I've been hearing about her class mates - a collection of mostly (13) Western men mostly of a certain age with either Thai girlfriends or wives. And five women. Some of whom had Thai boyfriends. And one of the best foreign language teachers Joan has ever had. And she learned a number of sentence patterns and vocabulary words and it's obvious she's got a lot more Thai now. I did talk to her teacher and asked about program for people like me who can basically get along, but with lots of gaps in terms of grammar and vocabulary.

The dinner was at a Thai buffet'barbecue' place. That means there are tables full of food which you cook over charcoal in little - I have no idea what they are called and I didn't take a picture, but they're aluminum 'pots' with a broth, but also in the middle an area you can cook fish or other things outside the broth.

You can see the vegies (to be cooked in the broth, but you can't see all the fish and shrimps and other things I don't even know waiting to be dropped into the broth.



And here are the pseudo Western sweets on the left and Thai sweets on the right. Those bright yellow ones, if I recall right are made with egg yokes and lots of sugar.



And here are some more Thai desserts. I'm not sure what these are, but I know them and love them. You get these noodley, dumpling like things, with a little coconut milk and some crushed ice on a hot night. MMMMMMMMMMMMM. So goood. We paid much, much more than we do for a normal dinner which can range from100-150 Baht ($3-5) for the two of us. I'm not sure what the buffet was, but we all got asked to put in 200 Baht apiece (which covered the drinks) or about $6 each.


These two guys are Australians. The one in the white whose face was blurred to protect him (actually there just wasn't that much light and he moved during the slow shutter click) was an undercover detective for 30 or more years. So I filled him in on some of the things going on in the Ted Stevens case. His reaction that some sort of fix was in. He also said he spent five, I think, months in Iraq to pay off his house. He had nothing good to say about what is going on. Well, he did say while there may be some issues with the Americans, their behavior is far more exemplary than that of most of the other players. But he was obviously upset when he talked about some guys he met early on who said they wanted the war to last forever. "Don't you care about all the people who are getting killed?" "Hell, we're getting $40,000 a month and we want that to go on forever." What would have taken him ten years to pay off working in Australia took five or six months in Iraq he said. Thanks to the American tax payer.

Let's see, the guy on the right in the orange is a Brit who lives in Hungary and is here teaching cricket to kids and a couple of orphanages. The lady on the right is a 20 year old Brit who has a Thai boyfriend. The woman at the end of the table - almost in the middle of the picture - is the teacher.

It was a loud and raucous dinner - Thai music coming from one side, televisions going as well. The group went to karaoke afterward, but we went on home.


Tonight was a totally different experience. We'd run into Mike on the street the other night and he emailed the invitation:

We are very happy to invite you to a Shabbat celebration to be held at the Blue Pearl Yoga Studio.

We hope this will be the start of a more regular format instead of the smaller gatherings

It would be great if you could come. The more the merrier and we encourage members of all faiths and paths to join us.

Friday, 20/2/09 at 18:45

As usual, the food will be Pot Luck - Please bring whatever you like to eat but strictly vegetarian

The handouts with the words for the songs called it a Kabbalah Shabbat. So, from outdoor (but under cover) the size almost of a football field on Thursday, Friday was in a Yoga studio.
And we had four Cambodian monks from Wat Suandoke there to join us. Unfortunately, Thai Buddhist monks don't eat after 12 noon.

Azreal led the short shabbat service - he's originally a Canadian but, if I recall right, he's lived in the US and Israel and now has been in Chiang Mai six months. In addition to Canadians and Americans, there were two Thais, some Brits, and Italian, a couple of Austrians, and a German of Philipino/Chinese origin. It was really a special night. I'm glad did't succumb to my thoughts of just staying home tonight and taking it easy.

Buffalo Plane Crash and Our Small World

When the plane crashed in Buffalo, I thought about Rabbi Harry Rosenfeld who had been rabbi in Anchorage for many years before moving to a new congregation in Buffalo. I checked his blog but there was nothing there. (Now he has his comments from last Friday's Shabbat service about his cantor Susan Wehle who died in the crash.) Today someone emailed me this New York Times article about people gathering at Rabbi Rosenfeld's synagogue and home and [another nearby synagogue] to grieve.

. . . Close-knit is an understatement. In the suburbs of Buffalo, with their succession of two-story colonials and rambling ranches, residents spent the first half of the weekend piecing together how they were linked to the 50 people killed in the crash, including one man inside the home hit by the plane.

The ties to the victims were complex and overlapping. They sold them mulch, dined at their restaurants, planned funerals together and listened to their mothers chat proudly about them while getting pedicures.

They didn’t just know their names: they knew their histories and quirks. They knew who was allergic to flowers, what they liked to read and who had attended their daughters’ soccer games. . .

Better Barbet

[Friday, Feb.20, 2009 8am Thai Time]
The lineated barbet pictures the other day, well, you pretty much had to take my word for it. But today the barbets got into a tree much nearer our balcony - close enough for even my little powershot to get a recognizable shot. I know, it's still not one of those great telephoto shots, but for three times optical zoom it's not bad.

There were also koels calling, some red whiskered bulbuls, and a glimpse of what I think is a malkoha. We've only seen these far off or in today's case fairly close by well hidden in the tree and gone before we could really see it in the binoculars. We had some olive backed sunbirds the other day.