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.

 

Some Local Pattaya Color

Glitter Man

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

2ND PLANTING FINISHED

Choa is happy, he has finished planting the 2nd crop of corn. But now he is ready to head back down to Pattaya tomorrow.  I guess he is a bit anxious to get to town so he can make the Isaan concert.  Oh well, so much for my 2 weeks at home up here in the country.

Seems  you can not keep the boy on the farm once he has been to the big city.   

On a side note, the meds that the doc gave me for my swollen foot took about 2 days to start working but work they did. My foot is just about back to normal and I can walk without pain.

john

FINALLY SOME RAIN

It has been so hot up here that the late afternoon rains have been a great relief.  The only problem is that it seems to knock out the electric power. Yesterday it was out for about two hours and just as the sun was setting. Today was a little better as the rain came about 4PM so power went down but came right back up in 20 minutes maybe.  I have checked the prices of generators up here and they are not cheap by any means so I might just pass on that for awhile.  Another good thing about the rain is that now Choa can plant his next corn crop in a couple of days. Hope he has better results this time.