Sunday 28th April - Thursday 2nd May 2019 - .... and we're baaaack

I'm sitting here thinking "Yes, life is good but I'm not sure that I'd want to do this forever."
And by saying "do this" I mean pretty well not doing much at all.

I guess this is a "dry run" at the whole retired / not being at home with all our stuff/being in a place that goes from hot and humid to hotter and more humid / not having anyone close, (as in long term friends and family) close by / having real regular stuff that you need and or want to do and I shouldn't overthink it.
It might need some real sorting out, and quickly, or it might just be one of those days that make me feel out of sorts and it'll be all tickety boo tomorrow.

But let's move on to the big occurrences of the past four days, but this time I'll group them into categories rather than chronologically

OUR FOOD

Whilst we trawling the aisles for food at Makros we came across a pre-packaged paste of sorts that said, via our Google Translator, Fish Cake paste. 

The contents said all the right things but it looked a bit thin, as in it needing more fish or rice to make it into a pattie/cake that would hold together in the frying process.

Some glutinous rice, of which we had to buy 5kgs as they don't sell packets with smaller quantities, along with an egg and a bit of rice flour did the trick. 

They were utterly delicious. A wee bit spicy for Tiz, but she still found them full of flavour.

A salad with the best salad dressing, next to your standard Italian one (2 part good olive oil, one part balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Anything else you add to those basic ingredients is superfluous hipster fluff), Kewpie Sesame Dressing made those fish patties a gift from the gods.

Trust me on that.  

The simple fruit salad above takes advantage of beautifully ripe and delicious local fruit -

super sweet watermelon, large plump passionfruit, juicy rock melon with a big squeeze of nice sour lime juice. It is a lunch that comes second to none in these hot climates.

This offering took advantage of some spare par cooked rice noodles in the fridge.

Add four eggs, two Chinese sausages, a bunch of shredded mustard leaves, a splash of oyster sauce and you have a mixture to make some delicious "okonomiyaki", which in Japanese means "as you like it" and therefore appropriate for this dish.

 A tablespoon of sriracha instead of Kewpie mayonnaise, as used in Japan, makes it very nice indeed.

Salad leaves and a grated carrot with the aforementioned Kewpie Sesame dressing complement it.

...... and a G&T ......

Think of the fruit salad mentioned earlier, add a banana, a nashi pear, some rose apples and pour coconut milk over the top and you have food for the gods

The following few pics have a bit of a story, as you might expect.

We were talking to a new friend about gin one day and he mentioned that there is a place near the Cha Am Railway Station called the Hard Work Cafe that has a big selection of very good gins. 

It also happens to be on the street that is used by the Cha Am Wednesday Night Market.

Last Wednesday night we went up to the market with the intention of stopping off at the Hard Work Cafe for a gin or two before wandering around the market looking for more bugs to eat 😆 

When we got there, at ~5:30, the place was full, 😐, and so we went up to the little pop up bar 

(see previous post for more on that place) run by a really friendly local family instead.

But, we decided we would return on a night other than a Wednesday. 

On Tuesday night we walked the 1.3kms (yes, I later measured how far we walked using the very accurate Google Earth) and it was closed 😱

OK, there was obviously a plot by the gods to make sure that we would suffer before tasting this "selection of very good gins" but we had to eat so what now?

We had set off once before to eat at the Tex Mex restaurant at the other end of Narathip Road, 

1.7kms away, and yes I measured that too.

The Tex Mex place was open! Woohoo!

First up - A large (620ml) Chang please 

Always a 9/10

.... and a Margarita please.

According to my dining companion a 8/10

 The accompanying nachos with the American cheese on top and a side dish of jalapeños.

American cheese is processed cheese or “cheese food,” meaning it’s not actually real cheese. Most of it, but admittedly not all, is made with milk, whey, milk protein concentrate, milk fat, less than 2% of calcium phosphate, salt, sodium citrate, whey protein concentrate, sodium phosphate, sorbic acid as a preservative, cheese culture, enzymes, annatto, and paprika extract (for colour). In short most American cheese made with less than 51% actual cheese, so it shouldn’t legally be called "cheese."

As a pre-dinner filler 6/10

Tiz had the quesadilla and I had the pork burrito 

Both were very generous portions and were very, very tasty.

Tiz's was a little more spicy than she could handle so we swapped ~ halfway.

Every morning as we head off for our walk we wander past the cart that has the mango and sticky rice ready to apportion to passing folk wanting some as takeaway. 

We don't eat before lunch and are therefore a bit concerned about buying it later in the day as it would have sat there for way over two hours, which is the absolute limit for unrefrigerated rice. 

Uncooked rice can contain spores of bacillus cereus and those spores survive cooking. 

When rice cools slowly (i.e. you leave it on a counter to cool instead of being put into the refrigerator within 2 hours), the bacteria spores grow and produce a toxin that can make you sick.

Reheating the rice won’t kill those spores.

Aside from all that Tiz has always wanted to make mango, and cooked banana, and sticky rice.

Above you see the results which she was not entirely happy with, but I was beyond happy.

It was as good as any sweet as I've ever had, and was made just that little better by using a peanut, salt and chilli mixture I knocked up in the mortar and pestle.

Of course the portions you buy from the street stalls might add up to 150-200gms.

I reckon I ate 500-600gms and wished my stomach was twice the size so I could eat more!  

***

THEIR FOOD

All the pics above are taken early in the morning. Early being ~8.00am.

It's the time that the locals seem to have their first meal of the day 

and often it's rice porridge with chicken or pork or fish on top. 

The stalls you see are selling dried fish of every type, which is then rehydrated or beaten/shredded before being used as part of a dish which can be cooked or served cold.

The last picture shows a stall selling packs of three, as translated, Scomberomorus.

To you and I they are narrow-barred Spanish mackerel. They seem to be either smoked or sun dried.

I've caught quite a few when I worked in Bass Strait and they are wonderfully oily and when smoked make a great fish for snacking amongst many other uses.

Various fruit and fruit based drink are always available

And there are lots of deliveries going on all the time to the beach umbrellas

The crispy super thin wafer snacks, that we have no idea what they're called, 

are transported around like this all day as well.

They are incredibly fragile and yet the vendors never seem to break any.

***

BEACH SIDE SHOPPING

I remember these shell fly screen/door decorations used to be very popular in the holiday houses of the '70's. 

Buy yourself a colourful pair of board shorts or a shirt and, whilst you're so close, pop over and grab a bag of dried shrimp or squid.

The perfect example of competition.

If you  can't be bothered going to a stall a mobile one will come to you.

All sorts of mobile stalls cruise up and down the beach road servicing holiday makers with everything they need to enjoy a day at the beach.

This young guy, which I'm guessing was barely a teen, was out there selling floaties.

I'm also guessing he doesn't get driven to school by his mum or dad or have any of the luxuries most western kids consider their right.  

*** 

TRANSPORT

The big LPG cylinder (low right hand side of cart) right up front 

would make me nervous if it were me driving this rig.

There seems to be no limit on what these little outfits can do.

Pack the family and a load of goods into the side tray and off you go. 

Safety? Sure, you just hang on tighter!

A couple of leaking plastic containers with diesel fuel. 

I hope he gets to where he's going before they've leaked the entire contents onto the road.

Hitching up a trailer in Thailand requires a completely different approach.

Please take a good look at the picture above, and only then look at the pictures below.

The Waverunner has a high performance 3 cylinder. 1049cc engine and 

is being towed by a mediocre single cylinder 125cc scooter. 

🤔

Yes, you place the front bar of your trailer onto the seat and then you sit on it.

That's the way it's done.

Hitching and unhitching is very quick but you wouldn't want to stop in a hurry, even if you could.

I saw this guy pulling the banana boat with the Grom, 

but by the time I got close enough for a decent pic he'd unhitched it.

It was funny beyond words.

I've been told that Thais don't like to walk, which I took with a grain of salt.

And then I spotted the above.

Why walk your child in a pusher when you can load the child into the pusher AND THEN you load the pusher into your outfit and off you go! 

But you have to give credit where credit is due. At least this parent had the decency to turn the pusher around so the little person wasn't swallowing bugs, at speed, as they were heading down the road.  

I'm not sure what you would call this.

Can do attitude? Irresponsible? Funny? Stupid? Ingenious?

This load was, at the very least, 5 meters beyond the open tailgate.

And the guy had stopped off for a day at the beach with this load.

And then there's the fact that the police patrol the beach road quite heavily, but there seems to some strange anomalies with how they dispense their fines. 

I'm not sure anyone, Thais included, understand or are sure of how the laws 

and the issuing of fines works.

 Thirteen (13) people piled out of this dual cab ute.

This is what is called maximising the use of a vehicle.

In Melbourne, tradies take themselves, and only themselves, as in with no-one else, 

to work in one of these. 

Don't believe me? 

Just drive into the CBD, at 6:30am on any working day, 

and look into any of this type vehicle on the way there. 

One often sees bikes with helmets in the basket.

But most riders here seem to think that even if it just stays in the basket all will be OK.

Maybe they're banking on being able to get the helmet onto their head and buckled up before they come to a sudden stop, against a wall or gutter or bumper bar. Good luck with that!

And then we have those of us that believe that as long as the helmet is sitting on your head 

the strap doesn't need to be done up.

I hope Darwin was right with his theory of the evolution of species by natural selection.

But there are some sensible people here too.

This is a motorcycle taxi, as is evident by the orange vest, which has a number on the back.

A motorcycle taxi ride cost about 50 baht (~$2.10 AUD) for a 2-3kms trip,
but you can usually get 2 people on the back 😀 which makes the ride really cheap 

Two of three on a motorcycle wearing helmets in commendable

The age limit for a motorcycle license is 15 but these two kids could not have been more than 12 years old, and that's being generous. Safety footwear also not required. 

And there are all the other variations on safety ......

Dad has a helmet.

Mum has a sun hat, which helps protect her from the sun, which is also important.

Little girl learns that she needs to hang on to her sun hat when standing between dad's legs on the scooter. 

Three up, and only one of them texting on the phone! 

Wow, wonders never cease!

No helmets required, as they were only doing a little over 60kph ..... in a 40kph zone

 Yet another "helmet in the basket" rider

Three up and not a helmet in sight

Another variation on three up and one helmet

Many wear a large sunhat/face mask combination.

It wouldn't help much in a crash but it does keep the sun off your head and the bugs out of your teeth!

A nice little Nissan Micra

A pretty average picture, which really doesn't do it justice, of a wee little cafe racer

A new looking Benelli Adventure bike.

I'd not seen one before but it didn't surprise me to see one for the first time in Thailand.

RANDOM

You would have a hard time using the SMIDSY (Sorry Mate I Didn't See You) excuse if you ran into this bus!

It was much much brighter in real life.

MAMILs  (middle-aged men in lycra) are world wide 

Some days the beach road is eerily quiet, which makes for a pleasant change.

Unfortunately we never seem to find out why or how we can plan ahead for these quiet days.

Four utterly gorgeous young kids all cleaning up their patch of beach.

When you greet them with a "Sawadee krap/ka" their faces light up 

with a smile that melts your heart. 

Mr "Mudguts" at the north end of the beach road

... but he's working hard at getting fitter losing those extra kilos.

This truck had a speaker in the back which was spruiking something or other,

BUT IT WAS LOUD

REALLY LOUD

And then you have a other days where the only quiet time is very early in the morning, 

which is followed by the madness that beach goers bring.

This pic contains everything from the cheapest to the dearest forms of paid for beach fun available.

To the far left are truck tubes which you rent for ~$1 AUD/day, in the middle a banana boat ride which I have no idea of the cost, but from what I've seen is affordable by middle-class families, and to the far right a Waverunner which is about $30k AUD in Thailand

Council cleaning crews that are normally seen on Wednesday mornings 

along the beach and beach road

This is a restaurant/bar at the south end of the beach road.

I took a picture of it because I wanted to see if Google Translate could tell me what it said.

I was certain that the three characters below the leopard would say "Leo"

Try it for yourself, and then you will understand what I mean by -

Just when you think you're getting things sussed out and you're understanding a bit of what Thailand is, you very quickly, and in no uncertain terms, get shown that you know nothing, and that includes the way they communicate, including signage.

A very dapper looking man, complete with stetson hat to complement his suit and tie on Thailands Labour Day holiday on May 1st

My favourite truck in the whole world. This thing puts any and every rat-rod I've ever seen to shame.

We, as in Euro/Anglo white trash,  go to the beach to "get a bit of colour" and many of the locals, both here and a lot of the rest of Asia, go out of their way to "whiten up". Almost every cosmetic and teeth cleaning product you see here advertises its "whitening" ability.

This girl, which we see every morning, looks like she just came from the set of "The Walking Dead".

This setup, with its expensive Waverunner tow vehicle, is obviously aimed at the wealthier tourists

This ad is spruiking a new golf course which will be built just over the road from the beach by Lumpini Developments.  

....because the world, and particularly Thailand and most third world countries, 

need more golf courses. 🙃 

Home after our morning walk ..... 

..... and into the pool.

We hope you like what you have seen in this post and that you come back for more.

kop khun krap