hey guy
lizard napping at thc rooftop bar, across from thapae gate.
WHENBESSATTACKSblog
painted jezebel
this little guy was hanging out with me when i ate lunch at miguel’s mexican restaurant near the east gate the other day.
the road between chiang mai and pai
a super shaky video of clips from the bike drive between chiang mai and pai. don’t watch full screen, it’ll probably make you want to barf. there’s some buffalo about halfway through.
wowee!
kad suan kaew mall is having some sort of festival or something and there’s all these workers building a massive undersea scene out of bamboo and paper mache. it’s soooo cool! and it’s all crafted by hand, which is incredible. i love crafty things! i’m not sure when this festival thing happens, but i hope i can see the finished results. they’re building a lot of it into the mall, with octopuses wrapped around pillars and whatnot. plus it looks like they’re building a lot of it so people can climb around inside of the creations.
some finished creatures and anemone:
octopus tendril taking hold of a beam of wood:
a better view of the giant octopus
a shark mouth with walkways in it:
some people working on the bamboo frame of a submarine:
here’s a panoramic view of the whole thing, view it at full size!!!!
sir reginald whiskerton
a cute little kitty with a dapper kerchief:
the weather has been FANTASTIC lately… they weren’t kidding when they said it was the dry season. no humidity whatsoever, and even though i like rain i think i can deal with occasional cloud cover with temps in the 70s during the day and down to the 50s at night. makes me wish i brought my jacket with me.
books and a giant moth
so i’m out of novels to read. we brought 5 or 6 with us and i finished them about a month and a half after we moved here. now i’m looking to re-read catch 22, which was my favoritest book in high school… but i have to find a copy to buy first. there’s several used book stores around with english language books, but it’s kind of pricey – like $7USD for a used book! oh well. since we’ve been eating more-than-decent meals here for under $5USD/day for both of us, i can splurge on slightly overpriced used books.
the book store we went to today had a gigantic moth flying around in it – you can see it to the right in the picture here:
temple animals
a lot of stray animals seek refuge on temple grounds, i think because the monks feed them and people drop off their animals at the temples if they can’t take care of them.
here’s a mewing little temple kitty:
elephants
ran into a “little” elephant on the way out to some bars the other night:
you pay 20 baht for some sugar cane to feed the elephant. pretty cool!
we were on our way to this bar cluster that’s close by where we live. it’s full of mostly reggae bars, but there’s some other options to. one of the bars is called zoe in yellow and there’s usually a dj who plays electronica of various kinds:
there’s this other place called cafe del sol that has live cover music by this one guy almost every night. he’s really good! there’s another place called heaven beach that has a live band i think every night as well. they do covers of mostly 90s alternative music. they’re really good too, and the crowd really gets into it:
and here’s shaun with a big chang beer (it’s cheap and not too bad):
in chiang mai, seeing an elephant doesn’t mean you’re drunk (necessarily)
so there’s this cluster of bars really close to where we live… it’s pretty cool, there’s always live music in one or more of them, and the people are really laid back. there’s a ton of alt 90s music, which is excellent (anyone who knows me know i have grown weary of the retro 80s crap that’s been going on since the 80s ended… enough is enough! bring on another decade for crying out loud! anyway…). it really brings me back to when i first was getting into music, lots of nostalgia and whatnot. me and shaun went and got more than a few chang beers there the other night. we were sitting outside and a baby elephant came up! it was so awesome, though i did feel kind of bad for the little guy, walking around the city. apparently some elephant handlers bring their elephants out at night and get people to buy sugar cane off of them to feed them. it was pretty cool to just see an elephant hanging out though. we didn’t get a picture, but i’m sure we’ll see more. rad! we danced for the rest of the night to the band playing inside. it was really fun, but the next morning i felt like that elephant had come home with us and sat on my head all night. it was worth it though.
a rooftop bar
the other night we checked out this rooftop bar off moon muang rd just south of the eastern gate (tha phae).
on the way back home shaun caught a baby gecko. they’re everywhere, kind of like the cockroaches in wilmington but they don’t scurry across the sidewalks. they’re the reason we haven’t seen any bugs around, i’m sure. i love them!
