Raising the Roof
Last week Choa headed back home to attend a Buddha fucntion at the Wat. I asked him what the occasion was because there was not a holiday that I was aware of. He could not explain it in English so I didn’t think anymore about it. As it turns out it was fund raiser to put a new roof on the main building. It turned out to be a well attended function mainly due, I believe, because of the free food. Everyone chipped in and made a different type of dish.. An open air covered dish party. They asked Choa to come up make Papaya Pok Pok (sp) which apparently he is pretty good at. It is that spicy salad with fermented crabs. Yummy for them but I pass.
That was the good part of the trip. The bad part was losing the entire corn crop due to all the heavy rains. Now he will have to wait till after the first of the year to plant again.
Pattaya Visit
Choa and I have been back in Pattaya now for about 2 weeks. For me it is good to get a decent internet connection and for him he gets to see all of his friends. It is actually starting to pick up a bit for the beginning of “High Season”. I do hope it arrives quickly as to give the business here a need boost from what was a pretty dead “Low Season”. The weather here has been great with temperatures around 22C (72F) during the day down to about 20C (68F) at night. All of the Farang are loving it and the Thai think winter has set in and are wearing jackets, scarfs and I have seen some with gloves. They are really cold.
The traffic is starting to get really bad but that is not due to all the visitors arriving. Seems Pattaya has decided to do more major road work on the main streets right at the begining of the busiest time of the year. Figures. Sometimes I just don’t understand their thinking process. Then again, they don’t understand mine either
Once you get to Jomtien Beach after driving through all the constrution and the roadwork trash left behind you will find lots of people. What a difference a month can make. In September and the first part of October the beach was rather dead. It is nice to see the change.
The Water is Cold
We had been in Pattaya for awhile when Choa got a call he needed to come back to the village. Seems an elderly man who he had know all of his life had died. Since he was only going to be gone for about 3 days I didn’t want to go. The trip there and back in such a short period of time would have worn me out. He decided to ask a friend of his to join him and Mack wanted to go.
After all the funeral arrangements and ceremony was completed there was still a day left for just messing around. They decided to go to the waterfall since Mack had not seen it. This is a good time of year to go, rainny season brings much water


It had been rainning earlier in the day and that along with the volume of water falling caused there to be alot of mist in the air which of course shows up in the photo. That does make for an intersting backdrop though.

If you look close enough you can make out 3 people sitting.

Since other people had gone in the water, why shouldn’t they




Looks like they had a good time but Damn, I bet it was cold
LUCKY NUMBERS
While a backhoe operator was working on digging out an area to install a pond he ran across what the village seems to believe to be two very old boats that were buried in the ground. Upon inspection everyone came to the conclusion that the boats were between 150 and 200 years old. This was a lucky find so everyone gathered to bless the boats and see if they could find some lucky lottery numbers written or scratched into the wood.. Would you believe.
Flowers were laid on the ground and the boats to try and insure the best luck for finding good numbers. As you can see from the amount of flowers placed that the people are really serious.
Now that the flowers are place and the prayers said it is time to start looking for the numbers. As the people look they place pieces of gold leaf on the spots where they believe to of found lucky numbers. If you look and use a little imagination you can see some numbers
Looks like 070 and 160 are the lucky numbers Choa found. I wish him luck





















