Tag: #thailand

Now quite a few restaurants are open and so the need to scrounge around for various interesting sources of food is not that necessary. But even until two weeks ago I was learning where to go to buy things that were not junk food and could be either eaten the way they are or mixed together to create something different and delicious.

I am not a cook by any means but I learned to do many of the basics mostly to be able to eat the flavors I like when I want and also as medicine. This short blurb will just focus on what I made last night. I’m working on a overall perspective of food in Thailand, not too long, and should have it finished in a week or so. I think that blog will be very helpful all around the world, not just in Thailand.

In the photo you will see what I bought and created.  Half the rice from the night before was left over since I try not to eat that much every day due to my fairly strict diet.  I might mention here that in general Thai food is not fattening compared to some other foods but it’s pretty easy not to gain weight or to lose weight if you eat the way other people eat here. In the last three months I lost 7 kg (15.5 lbs). That is due to my diet, eating just a yogurt in the morning and then one meal in the evening and also an unusual amount of exercise, swimming in the ocean twice a day, and the healthfulness of Thai food. 

On the right you will see the grilled pork sticks which are grilled in slightly sweet seasoning and below the pork you see the spring rolls made of vegetables and noodles. Those were just purchased and reheated in the microwave.  The sauce for the grilled pork sticks is right above the bowl. It is a very spicy sauce something that would be considered mildly spicy here but which most non-spicy people might find difficult to eat without somehow diluting.  The sauce for the spring rolls is directly above the plate with the spring rolls, the typical sweet pepper sauce you find in the grocery stores. I find that the over sweetening in that sauce needs to be balanced with some pepper sauce like sriracha which I added to give it more of the spicy taste which I like.

Anybody who uses a microwave knows that most microwave cooking will leave food damp and not crispy. That’s because all it does is heat the water molecules. It doesn’t dry out contents like an oven does.  But I haven’t found it a big enough problem to try and figure out a way to work around that with no access to an oven.  So the spring rolls wind up a little bit mushy but maintain their taste very well so I don’t think too much about it.  And it’s easier to cut the spring rolls so they don’t fall apart when they’re mushy instead of very crispy. When they’re crispy and then cut into pieces improperly they tend to just completely fall apart.

Now I get to the main stuff in the bowl. I had some rice left over from the night before and bought some coconut milk which is a good additive especially when adding spices in Thai food.  Then I chopped up and threw in some rice/raw pork fermented sour sausage (NAEM). I like that because it has a sour taste and they often put peppers in them so it adds some spice.  But that’s not enough spice for me so I added some chili sauce which is very much like a Sriracha base but it has a slight tinge of sugar.  That’s it.  I enjoyed the combination of little things reheated and leftovers made into something with the tastes I like.

Listen to this but get ready to plug your ears. I don’t know what kind of bug or animal created this sound but this morning in Khanom it decided to really BUG me, almost had to plug my ears it was so irritating!

Covid 19 caution had most popular beaches closed. Those in high risk provinces were under close scrutiny while in less risky places like this province, Nakon Si Tamarat, have remained open though all services were suspended and the countrywide lockdown reduced beach going numbers to almost zero. 

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1930864/beachgoers-put-mayor-on-alert

Since the “ban” on beach going did not affect me i was in the water twice a day as i am also today and will be until i am able to get back home to Japan. 

The beaches mentioned in the article are target weekend spots for people from a large city, Bangkok, so no surprise the numbers exploded. But beaches in distant areas, here and Phuket, are not really for the big city weekend crowds, they are for more scarce local province people and longer stay tourists and they are either fewer in numbers, non weekday visitors or, in the case of foreign tourists, travelers not allowed into Thailand yet in any significant numbers. 

If you plan a beach visit try the Thai preferred places. They will be quite an interesting mix of people. Definitely avoid beaches favored by Chinese tourists. China tour groups have no problem booking people to beaches in numbers that don’t allow even enough space to sit. This was true of the beach near Phi Phi island where the movie “The Beach” was filmed staring Leonardo De Caprio. So, remember, “Life is a Beach!”

By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.

When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.  

Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air.   My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email. 

I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work. 

I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.

So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions.  It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles.  So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power.  In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses.  It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning. 

My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.  

During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings.  One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero.  So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging.  Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.

So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it.  And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device.  So that’s about “batteries in paradise“.   HAVE A NICE DAY!

in Paradise. By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.

When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.  

Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air.   My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email. 

I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work. 

I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.

So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions.  It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles.  So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power.  In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses.  It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning. 

My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.  

During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings.  One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero.  So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging.  Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.

So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it.  And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device.  So that’s about “batteries in paradise“.   HAVE A NICE DAY!

The word hyperbole is from two Greek words.  HUPÉR (above) + BÁLLŌ (I throw). So let me do a little throwing above. 

When you learn to scuba dive a very important principle is from Archimedes, supposedly, the law of buoyancy.  The key is weight.  If the weight of the water which is displaced by some object is heavier than the weight of the object then the object will float and we say it is positively buoyant. My additional rule is a very simple one. Humans are basically fish. How do I know that? We are basically neutrally buoyant, which means if we breathe out we will sink and if we breathe in we will float. But as we get older that can change.

When I was 62 kg all the way through high school until I was about 48 I was neutrally buoyant, actually skinny.  But then I started eating Philippine food four times a day, lots of adobo which is half pork fat. So I wound up at between 78 and 84 kg. So what happens to all of that pork fat and a certain kind of way we tend to gain weight as we get older?  It turns into filler throughout the muscle which we call fat.  That is lighter than, less dense then, our general muscle tissue so that tends to change our buoyancy. 

How do you survive on the ocean and on the beach?  when I was a kid going to the beach our father taught us kids a very simple principle. If you hold your breath and let your body float on the top of the water with almost none of your body under the surface you will float and the waves will bring you into shore  That is almost always true with a few exceptions.  That rule saved me from drowning at Sandy Beach in Hawaii number of years ago. It took two hours to get back to the beach after I was completely worn out from fighting the current. But I remembered what my father taught me when I was a kid, I floated on the top of the waves and eventually made it to shore. The art of the save was in spending most of my time with air in my lungs so I would float. At that time I was 62 kg and if I had let the air out of my lungs I would have sunk.  

Before I came back to Thailand a few months ago I was 84 kg. Through exercise and diet I’ve gotten down to 77 kg.  But even with that diet it would be very difficult for me to die in the ocean. If I let all the air out of my lungs I still float due to the fat in my body being more buoyant than the water it displaces. The problem is when I go diving I have to put on more weights to get me back to neutral buoyancy than I did when I was 62 kg back in the 1990s.

So the moral of the story is if you diet too much and get back to your neutral buoyancy state you could risk death in the ocean.  Hyperbole?  Maybe, maybe not.

By now you know I’m stuck in southern Thailand. In this case “stuck“ seems like a very enjoyable interpretation.  One friend in Hawaii yesterday told me Japan might allow me back in soon. I responded, “I hope not“.  

I set my daily schedule basically by jellyfish. The second determination is weather. The only thing I have scheduled every day is going to the beach and getting some exercise in the ocean.  The jellyfish start to come in at about 5:45 in the evening so I try to get to the beach at about 5:15 to get a half hour swim.  The second constraint is whether or not it’s cloudy. If it’s cloudy I can go down to the beach anytime and not get sunburned. And after about 5:15 the sun starts below the palm trees and I don’t wind up getting too much sun.  

Two days ago there was absolutely no wind and the ocean was so calm and glass like, some thing I have very rarely seen in my five years on the ocean.  you could get your eye right down just above the water line and see all the way along the water to the beach 5 km away.  That is a real zero situation to do body surfing in but there are many different kinds of swimming.

Four days ago it rained very hard at the beach and produced a very interesting and beautiful effect on the water. The drops falling on the water bounce off and project silver pillars, millions of them, a short distance into the air producing over a long distance a very deep fog like Haze. And there is some thing especially fun about having rain pouring down on you which is cooler than the ocean water.  The ocean water here near the shore is about 82°F (28°C).  The inclines are only a degree or two lower. 

Here I think it’s a good idea to tell you I hate swimming pools.  The chlorine and the other things that come from humans, deposited it in the water, are very bad for humans.  On top of that so many people expect swimmers to go in a straight line. I never learned to do swimming in a straight line. Well, I guess I did at the community swimming pool when I was just a kid. But almost all my swimming has been in the ocean, copying the swimming techniques of the otters and seals. That is not exactly straight line, competition swimming.  Oh, i just remembered getting suspended from the pool for short periods of time for swimming like a seal.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get enough wind so we can get some kind of waves. The beach here in Khanom is a very shallow and gradual slope so it doesn’t really produce the large, close to the beach waves you see in Hawaii, La Jolla or other beaches where the shore slope is greater. So for body surfing this is not really a great beach. However, given the right circumstances it can produce large enough waves to just enjoy and have fun with and get washed up on the beach.  

Some people talk about techniques to body surfing. I am not sure i know the formal “techniques”. I just DO IT. What I enjoy is finding the right technique to place the body given a certain wave. It’s not all successes.  

I look at body surfing as an analogy to life and how to live. Most of it is about where you are, position and what the circumstances are, the wave.  You are in a certain position that is not easily and rapidly changeable.  The water is the most massive thing on earth that controls you. If you think you control the water you will die.  It is important to find the right position for your kind of body surfing. On top of that you have the choice of wave to avoid. You can either duck under and avoid it totally, you can smash headfirst into the middle of it, or you can let it smash you and roll you into the beach.  Those are decisions you need to make fairly quickly.  But also given a certain wave there are different body stances. You can put your arm out and try to position yourself to the top of the wave and sort of surf it in. You can try to catch it in the middle and ride it until it breaks, giving you a little bit more pressure towards the shore. You can start at the bottom, go sideways and decide to go under it and skip it or to let it propel you to the top by itself. But even if you go to the top of the wave if it curls too soon it can curl you and smash you down on the beach. It’s about position, decision making and timing. That’s how I see life.  So for me, going into the ocean is life. When I was a little kid we would go to La Jolla to visit our grandparents and uncles and aunts. They lived just one street up from the beach and we accessed the beach through a public walkway going down to what we called “whispering Sands“. The sand squeaked under our feet as we walked and that’s why we called it “ whispering Sands“.  It’s way south of the Cove.  

Every time I got to the beach I had this crazy feeling, very physical. There was a rope connecting me and the ocean and the ocean was pulling me in.   There was no way when I went to the beach I couldn’t resist going in. The pull was way too strong. Even if I had to strip down to my underpants I would still go in.  But I learned at an early age respect for the ocean is the most important thing. It is similar to the respect we need to have for life. If you don’t respect the ocean and understand it you will die.  I have come close to death in the ocean several times. Once was not my doing but the other time was due to a lack of respect, and the mistake was almost fatal. 

That’s all folks!

I have to admit I’ve used a little bit of hyperbole here. What you see in this video is not really gigantic ants, something you might envision from the title, The title I imagined from my childhood similar to “the revenge of the cyclops“ (I don’t think that was a real movie though I do remember the cyclops movie). But they can be very dangerous nonetheless. 

Back in the 1990s I bought a Samsung laptop, one of their first, which was really very subpar. No, wait, that’s not the right computer. Delete that from your memory. I put together a desktop in about 1994 with an inexpensive keyboard. One day Some of the keys on the keyboard were not working. I looked around and I saw a constant trail of ants going, where I thought was under the keyboard but was actually a constant stream going inside the keyboard. I took the keyboard apart and I found these itsy-bitsy, teeny weenie pieces of silicon all stacked up close to where the ants were coming inside the keyboard. Those keyboards had a silicone pad underneath the keys that would create the travel distance and “pop back“ function for the key so it would go back into the up position after pushing down.  The ants had broken off little tiny pieces of silicon and decided they were important to take back to the nest and I guess before they could get them all out of the keyboard they decided to do a stocking up next to the entrance/exit for another group of ants to take back to the nest. I was guessing they had divided up the jobs between the ants. One would break off little silicone pieces and take them back to stack up near the keyboard exit and the other group would carry the little pieces back to the nest. When I looked closely I saw the stream of ants leaving the keyboard actually had very small tiny pieces of silicone meant for the nest. 

So this is where the nomen “monster“ comes from. Last week I had taken my MacBook air outside to work on the patio table and then returned it back inside the room. Later in the evening I noticed ants going in and out the USB-C port and imagined the worst, a repeat of 1994 and the attempted total destruction of my computer. That’s when I went to get this little green poison thing to put by the computer. It worked.

Some of you may think this is a very cruel way to deal with ants but I can assure you, according to the computer world, it was life or death,  it was them for me.

Tangmoo (Thai for watermelon) needs to get into my room for some reason.

I was able to escape California for Singapore on March 12 which was pretty lucky for me. On the 17th I flew from Singapore to Thailand just one day before Singapore shut down flights and Thailand and Malaysia shut down new entries into the country. 

As many of you know I am now stuck in Thailand with the only other country available being the US. But I have spent way too much time there and have absolutely no interest in going back right now. Maybe sometime I’ll go visit the national parks.  

I had a bank account in Thailand and thought I should probably change all that old, diverse foreign currency into Thai Baht in Singapore, where the exchange rates are good, and take that cash with me to deposit in the Thai bank so I could use my ATM card in Thailand instead of using the debit cards from foreign accounts which incur rather high withdrawal fees in Thailand.

So, going up to the foreign-exchange counter, pulling out my international currency wallet and going through the currencies the exchange company would change for me, which happened to be a much more excepting number of older bills then what a Thai bank would exchange, I was surprised to find that about 3/4 of all the foreign cash I had extra from visits to different countries had exceeded US$1,700.  They gave me an envelope with about 55,000 Thai baht and I vowed to make it last as long as possible.

When I got to Thailand I found that the bank account has been closed since the balance had decreased below a certain amount for a certain period of time and they did not allow tourist to open bank accounts anymore in Thailand so I was stuck with the envelope of cash. My hope was to make it last about two months if possible which was the longest amount of time I would be able to stay in Thailand with just a tourist stamp and without a visa.

To my amazement it turned two months a few days ago and I had almost made the cash stretch out to the limit except for about US$60. All of my expenses included hotels, food and anything else I needed.  Of course the current health crisis has helped slightly with a decrease in hotel prices, the free use of the motorcycle where I am now and the free dogs and cats at the resort. Since I am the only customer, most of the time, the free dogs and cats for company is very helpful. Let’s hear it for free dogs and cats. Hip, Hip, Horranimals!