My oh my, where to begin? This is going to be a long entry, so buckle up.

It's been a surprisingly crazy few weeks or so, despite me being on my summer vacation. While I have had some work to do for work, my job ended in February and doesn't really begin again until mid-May. Why? I dunno. Thai people like to chill out. So there are some training sessions for work, but I'm mostly left to my own devices to work at home. Which means "work on my degree at home". It's coming along well, and I just finished all my work for this semester. A short summer semester followed by the fall, and I will be a master of something or other. It's going by so quickly!

I have a pretty strict "no working on the weekend" rule, so there's still been some time to go out and do things. For our latest adventure, Ella and I hoped over to Thonburi. It's the district on the other side of the river, and really doesn't get too much exposure. It's not well served by mass transit, the bridges are always full of traffic, and there's not really much to do aside from Wat Arun. But we found a few places regardless, beginning with Wongwan Yai Railway Station. I guess there's no reason to go there, it's just the terminal of a completely separate railway network. A single track that runs about 3 hours away to the semi-famous train market. You may have seen it, where a train runs through and everyone pulls back their umbrellas. Maybe I'll throw a Youtube video if it in here. Anyway, the market just re-opened after a year long absence, so I'm sure we'll go check it out at some point. But after this brief pit stop, it was off to Princess Mother Park. I think the Princess Mother means the mother of the current King. Anyway, it's a small park, tucked back in some alleys. But it's actually really nice, and contains a small museum. If I lived nearby, I could see myself coming here a lot. There were some students hanging around studying, some joggers, and they even had a daycare for parents who want to ditch their kids and relax.

Across the street we saw a really big and pretty wat, which was Wat Phichaiyat. I was really impressed with this place to be honest, and think it should be featured on Bangkok travel guides. There's nothing too special about it, except it's beautiful and the view from the top gives you a great view of the area - which is enough. I suppose I'm glad it's not overrun with tourists, as we only saw another 3 or so people there. Still, wonderful place that I would take people to visit.

Continuing the interesting wat train, the next week we visited Wat Pariwat. This one is pretty far off the beaten path, but certainly one of the most interesting religious sites in the world. The entire thing is covered in broken dishes. It's exactly what it sounds like. They smash dishes, paint them, and place them onto the walls one at a time into amazing sculptures. Some of these sculptures are quite strange. Like Che Guevara. Or Mickey Mouse. Or Pandas. But they're all intricately detailed, and overall it's a pretty beautiful place. Their eccentricity doesn't stop there, though. The main assembly hall nearby has a large Buddha supported by a bunch of statues. Perhaps for fun, and because Thais love football, they decided to make one of the statues David Beckham. Why? Because they can. I've said before how I really like eastern religions over western, as western ones can be a bit... stuffy. I don't think a David Beckham statue would fly in any sect of Christianity, something about being sacrilegious etc etc. But I think it's great that if someone wants to make a church with Disney and football stars, go nuts. It gives it a lot of personality, and I'm a big fan.



But the eccentricity doesn't stop there. Oh no. This is Asia, my friends. We went to have lunch at an all-you-can-eat shabu shabu robot buffet. I know that's a lot of adjectives to process, but it's 100% true. You order your meat and vegetables, and a robot samurai will come out and deliver it to you. Also the robot dances to Lady Gaga. I absolutely love this place. It was completely unexpected, endlessly entertaining, and the best part? The food was really delicious. Perhaps one of the best shabu shabu buffets I've ever had, and much cheaper than some of the others I see around. My words really don't do this place justice, so here's two videos.

So, other things. We went out to an ice-cream shop that has an ice vodka room. Why in an ice cream shop? Because Thailand. For 300 baht, you get 10 minutes in a room covered in ice to drink as much vodka as you want. A bit steep, but, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. Heather and I went in together, with Dmytro acting as camera man. I probably did about 6-8 shots of vodka, which at around 80-100 baht each at a bar, I feel I got my money's worth. Also, the rest of the night was a bit hazy, so moving on.

At some point during a weekend, I also did an escape room with some coworkers. It's an odd sort of thing, and I've definitely not experienced anything like it. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, you basically get locked in a room and have to figure a way out. We had 45 minutes, but still lost. Although, I felt we got sort of cheated - we spent 30 minutes on some puzzle because of bad handwriting. Once we were past that, things went pretty smoothly. I think if we had 5-10 more minutes, we would've had it. Anyway, I'm counting it as a win. Because this is my blog, and I can.

As I said earlier I'm off from work right now, so I've been picking up some extra work to keep myself occupied. I recently finished up a contract teaching Pepsi's HR Department, which was fun. I also started teaching some Chinese students over the internet. But perhaps the most interesting, is through our Aussie neighbors we found out that some Thais were looking for foreigners to be in a commercial. So with Dmytro, our acting career began. Basically, we tailed this Iranian actor as we went around the city asking people "What is Songkran?" It was an extremely exhausting 2 days, but they took us all around the city to the famous landmarks. If I had just arrived, this opportunity would have been super sweet. But still, an interesting way to spend a few days and get some extra cash. Anyway, it's an advert for an English app. Here's the commercial if you'd like to see it.

So now for more recent news, for the official Thai holiday we went off to Pattaya and Koh Larn. I've spoken about Pattaya many times - it's an odd sort of place, a party city with a reputation as a red light area, full of 50 year old white guys who think their 25 year old Thai "girlfriend" is super into his personality. But Pattaya definitely knows how to party. We saw an amazing cover band, where everyone kept switching between instruments and singing like it was no big thing. Really talented bunch of folks, they played some amazing classics and just killed it. There's not all that much to say about the trip though. It was a lot of relaxing, massages, eating, and swimming on the beach. For example, we went to a German Beer House which was an Italian restaurant. That was weird. But they did brew their own beer, and it was actually really nice. We rented motorbikes one day and visited a putt-putt course a little out in the suburbs. Of course, the police pulled us over and asked for our licenses. Despite my American one being valid in Thailand, they refused to accept it and fined me anyway. Or to be more accurate, they wanted a bribe. Because it's funny, how the fine can change so quickly depending on how much you want to argue. Anyway, the end result was 400 baht, which was a ripoff, but it could have been worse. And it beats spending all day at the police station while they "verify" my license. Despite the gloomy mood, we did make it to putt-putt, and it was one of the better ones I've played at. You even got to hit a ball of a roof. Heading back to town via a detour to avoid the police stop, there was also a visit to Ripley's Believe it or Not, which the ever skeptical Blueberry chose to not believe anything. Hey, I have faith that a 3 headed snake existed at some point. Probably. Maybe.


Or not.

So now for something completely different. About a year ago, I remember speaking to some friends back home and the subject turned to Thai politics (because of the coup). I wrote a quick summary of Thai politics from the last 20 or so years, which I and a few other people thought was interesting. If you missed it, that entry is here.

A similar situation happened, where someone asked me if I had been eating a lot of Pad Thai recently. And actually... no I haven't. This may be a shock, but Pad Thai is pretty uncommon in Thailand. You may find it at a restaurant here and there, but those restaurants are almost exclusively around tourist areas to capitalize on its reputation. It's really uncommon as a street food, despite it being believed as such. There are no shortage of noodle stalls, but they're always boiled, not fried. So what the heck is going on?

It's actually an interesting piece of history, that started back in 1938. At the time, the country was still known as Siam. And this general, Phibunsongkram decided to overthrow the government via a coup. At the time, Thailand was surrounded by European colonies. Laos and Cambodia were French, while Myanmar and Malaysia were British. In the middle was Siam, which had really not changed at all despite the advances in technology. Most of the population was rural and uneducated, and Phibunsongkram was afraid (in retrospect, probably rightfully so) that Siam was going to become the next colony of some European nation. So to shake off this reputation as some cultural backwater, and to establish a sense of national identity, he came up with 12 Cultural Mandates. We'll come back to that in a sec.

Sidebar, military leaders in Thailand have had a really endearing, somewhat adorable sense of care for Thai people. Our current leader, Chanocha, used one of his news conferences to tell everyone how great this Korean soap opera he's been watching is, and we could really learn from the characters on it. (Seriously) And recently, he gave a speech about how we should let tourists do homestays on rice farms, because they'll love working and learning about how rice is made (Although honestly, I'd probably do that). So it's not totally out of line for a military leader to suggest something like this.

Anyway, these 12 Cultural Mandates are mostly what you'd expect. Honor the flag, help the elderly, choose domestic goods over foreign. Notably, one of them was to change the name of the country to Thailand. Some also got a little... personal. For example, immediately after work you were encouraged to play an hour of sports before going home. Also, in public men should always wear hats (yes!). Many of those have been ignored, but most of the nationalistic ones stuck, notably of course changing the name of the country. But lumped into those nationalistic mandates, was food. Thai people ate noodles of course, but they were usually wheat, and were sold by Chinese vendors. Thailand had a lot of rice. If people wanted noodles, why not make a dish with rice noodles?

And so, open source Pad Thai was born. Phibunsongkram gave everyone the recipe, and encouraged them to make it. The argument was, throw in some veggies and meat, boom, well balanced meal that was fast and delicious. But the name Pad Thai doesn't even really mean anything. "Pad" means "to stir fry", and Thai just means that - Thai style. The actual name of it is a shortened form of a local Chinese dialect, which includes the "noodle" part. Pad Thai was adopted by the people, especially this being the start of WWII. The cost of wheat had begun to shoot up, but rice was still cheap. This was also around the same time that foreigners started to come into Thailand, especially Axis powers. Pad Thai sort of got lumped into this time of "foreigness" And then after the war ended, people kinda just forgot about it. In class, I've often used Pad Thai as my stand in, "I need an example of a Thai food", but I'm learning my students are surprisingly unfamiliar with it. They usually claim it's not even a Thai dish at all - it's Chinese, or something foreigners made up. They're not exactly wrong, but nevertheless Pad Thai isn't really something Thai people eat very often. But it is sort of a Thai invention, albeit one that seems to be much more popular outside of Thailand rather than within.

Anyway, we'll be back next week with a regular blog entry, including some amazing stuff I've been up to recently.