When we finally got moving today, we made it one block to the Pacific/Robinson shopping mall. Up to the food court on the 4th floor where we stuffed our bellies for less than 100 baht.

Walking through the mall, I was again reminded of how poor T’s idea of money can be. I was admiring a Citizen watch that costs 21,000 baht and she said I should buy it. I said there’s no way I can afford it when I’m about to spend so much on dental bills. As we looked at some Tag Heuer watches and she was trying to talk me into getting one of those, I discovered that the Tag she wears is not a knock-off – she told me it cost 58,000 baht when she bought it a few years ago. She doesn’t seem to get the concept of “saving” – then again I’m no shining example either.

Anyway, a nap after lunch, a bit of afternoon delight, and then off to the night market. So many people know her there, we run into friends of hers everywhere. We grab some fishcake with cucumbers and sweet chili sauce to munch as we walk around. T stops at the fried insect stand, I tell her I don’t mind the fried earthworms, but we decide to save our appetite for dinner.

Then foot massage. This time I select the place and we’re both happy with the outcome. A one hour foot massage (180 baht each) also includes leg, arm and shoulder massage. Some quasi-famous local singer is in there the same time as us and the girls are pissed off because he leaves without tipping.

We head off in search of a Japanese restaurant she knows but it’s closed for the holiday season. It seems that the #1 type of restaurant in this town is Japanese, #2 for some reason is Isaan food. As we wander around and I get hungrier and hungrier, finally I insist on this busy outdoor place. I reason if it’s busy, it must be good. Well, actually, it’s busy because it’s cheap. It’s an all you can eat what-they-think-is-Korean barbecue, buffet style, similar to the faux-Korean barbecue joints in HK. Pork, chicken, prawns, squid, fish, veggies and so on, with bowls of fish sauce and Sri Racha sauce for dipping. We get a hotpot at the table, fired with charcoal, not gas, the type that’s dry on top for barbecuing but with a thing around it to fill with veggies and minced meat to make soup. Off on the side there’s a huge barbecue grill where you can take your larger items for cooking. All you can eat and dinner for 2 costs 320 baht, with beer. That’s all you can eat for US$4 per person!!!!!

Then off to one of her favorite corner bars, one we also visited on my previous trip. The manager there is gay – very gay. I’m not sure what they’re discussing when suddenly he grabs my dick and says she told him I was big. I tell him if he pays me a thousand baht he can have short time with me. He licks his lips for a minute but does not take me up on the offer.

T tells me that she heard from her ex-husband, that he saw us together on her motorcycle the last time I was here. “Maybe I need to change my hair color,” he asked her. I tell her maybe he still loves her, even though it’s been at least 8 years since they broke up. She says no, he has many girlfriends now. I say, “doesn’t matter, maybe you’re still the special one for him?”

A few drinks and I’m getting pissed off because the only music we can hear is coming from the 2 piece band at Zenith across the street – all Western slow pop songs, badly performed. As the Thai whisky is kicking in, every time they end a song I’m yelling requests from across the street. “Stairway!” “Freebird you morose fuckers!” They go from Air Supply to Robbie Williams to the Four Seasons and when they get to “I can’t live if living is without you,” I’m ready to kill someone.

We walk back through town. Passing some Japanese karaoke hostess bar, T knows the mama-san so she stops to chat while I ogle the girls sitting outside. Passing another Thai night market that’s closing down, one stand is playing a VCD of some Thai rock band, some honest to goodness decent guitar rock. We jump up and down and dance in the street and then buy that VCD. The Silly Boys or something like that. Back through the square where the town’s annual New Years festival is winding down for the night, two guys on stage with acoustic guitars doing Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.”

Yeah, I know, today was Saturday, but when I’m here, every day feels like a Saturday.

First, shots from Bang Saen Beach, “Unseen in Thailand”?

Cheeky monkey:
T feeding the monkeys:


At a roadside stand, these beautiful stone mortars and pestles cost about US$5. Yes we bought one. T said it would be much better than the clay one I’ve got right now.

These hanging seashells thingies also cost about 5 bucks each.

Shucking oysters.
The new Chinese temple. There were signs everyone in Thai and Chinese. The only signs in English were those telling you what not to do and “Donation Box.”

I managed to squeeze off this one shot inside the main temple before someone pointed at the “No Photo” sign.
Ringing the temple bell for luck.

Sorry, no photos because haven’t transferred to the computer yet and too lazy to do right now.

Off to Baeng Saen beach, which I’ve probably mis-spelled. It’s a long stretch of beach with a walkway lined with vendors selling food, toys and souvenirs. Behind the vendors there is row after row of umbrella covered loungers with tables for you to eat whatever you’ve just bought. Then there is the beach, lined with guys renting jet skis, small motor boats and banana boat rides. Posters every three meters declare that this beach is part of “Unseen Thailand.”

While the food looked quite tasty – emphasis on crabs and prawns, grilled and fried – T said “maybe not fresh” so all we bought was a bag of durian chips. All, well maybe some of the taste of durian with none of the god awful smell.

At the northern end of the beach, past a couple of resort hotels, we dined at an open air BBQ seafood place built out over the water. A bowl of mussels was average, a dish of baby clams fried with chili was almost too spicy for me, but the soft shell crabs fried with garlic was just perfection. I think there were four crabs in this dish, which cost about US$5 and after we finished the crabs I started spooning some of that fried garlic. Small side bowls of fish sauce and Sri Racha sauce proved to be the perfect condiments.

Then a short drive took us up to the top of a hill with a commanding view of the area. It was also filled with lots of fat monkeys and vendors waiting to sell us fruits to feed the monkeys. Everyone was buying fruit and feeding them, hence the huge monkey bellies scraping the tarmac. One psychotic monkey reminded me of several people I know, or perhaps one of my dogs. If you went to give a banana to a different monkey, he’d run over and try to push the others out of the way. When he had half a banana in his hand, if you went to give him another one he’d throw away the perfectly good half he had in favor of the new one.

Following that, a stop at a new Chinese temple still under construction in the area. I really will have to post some pictures of this, one of the most ornate Taoist temples I’ve run across, clearly a lot of money went into this, gold everywhere.

Then a two hour massage. But it was not a good one. The woman massaging me was really fat and I kept worrying that she might try to walk on me or even just sit on me, so I could not relax and enjoy. The best thing about it was the US$6 price. I’ve had much better.

In the evening, what amounted to my first home-cooked meal in 10 years of traveling to Thailand. We went to the house of one of T’s cousins, apparently known as the best cook in the family. She has three kids and a Japanese husband – her next door neighbor also has a Japanese husband. Apparently guys who came down from Japan to work the factories there and discovered their little patch of nirvana. They had this sort of little wooden gazebo – benches surrounding a table on a raised platform with a wooden roof – sitting outside by the corner of their house and we sat out there to eat and drink.

The food really was delicious, even though it was simple. There was a kind of dry crabmeat curry. Tofu fried with shredded pork and chili. Soup with tofu and pork and aromatic herbs. And a western style salad with lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber and hard boiled eggs.

T was worried in advance that I wouldn’t like the food and had said that afterwards we could go someplace else if I was still hungry. But I took three servings of everything and was contemplating going back for fourths when our host broke out a bottle of Chivas Regal.

We made plans for a big group to hit one of the discos on New Years Eve and then for a big multi-family outing to some town near Pattaya for New Years Day.

With my wireless router working perfectly, used Skype installed on my Dopod to make some calls to the US for free. Geek heaven.

Aside from the crappy massage, absolutely nothing to complain about today.

I was brought to this beautiful outdoor restaurant in Sri Racha. I think the English name of the place is something like Mumaroi. While this looks like a big city tourist place, here it is in little Sri Racha. The place was packed and I only saw one or two other fereng eating there so it’s an upscale local place.

As you can see, in front, there are these giant aquariums.

In the huge tanks, on the bottom a giant catfish, above something that looks like it should have been extinct a hundred thousand years ago.

The restaurant is open air seating.

Terraced rows leading down to the beach.

The menu is in Thai and English, with lots of photos. All the food looked so good that each time another dish was brought to the table, I’d start eating and then remember later to take a picture. This is sea bass. T said she thought the sauce was a bit on the acid side – maybe it was but very tasty.
T didn’t know the English name for this one but I know this as Moreton Bay Bugs. Fried with garlic and spices. Oh my.
River prawns fried with chili and pepper. Very spicy. Very fresh. Actually there were about 8 prawns on the plate but I only remembered to take a pic after most of them were gone!

We also had a dish of squid and and my favorite crabmeat fried rice. Everything was super fresh and tasty. With beer, the total bill (for 5 people) came out to about HK$250. See why I like it here?

Am now in Sri Racha.

Flight down, got seated next to two Indian guys – of course the fat guy had to sit in the middle. Even though they were sitting next to each other, when they talked they yelled, mostly because they had a tendency to talk at the same time. I have no idea what they were talking about but the guy in the middle often got quite excited, jumping around and digging his elbow into me with each twist and turn. Finally he fell asleep and drowned out the jet engines and my ipod with his snoring. Being Indian, I thought they might have ordered a special veggie meal and was looking forward to checking that out, at least, but they just went for the standard chicken rice.

Unpacked now, I find that there are ten electrical chargers/adapters in my bag. Let’ see:

1. mobile phone
2. blackberry (no data service here, a peaceful weekend lies ahead)
3. laptop
4. wireless travel router
5. inMotion iPod speakers
6. Archos
7. GPS thingie
8. DVD drive for laptop
9. digital camera
10. bluetooth earpiece (but I don’t think I brought the actual unit that this charges)

This is seriously insane.

Well, at least the interwub seems to be working normally here. All my RSS feeds are coming in, NY Times page loads, lotsa catching up to do.

I would place strong odds on my having some seafood tonight. Thai-style fried rice with crabmeat, if I have any say in this.

Shortly after he was denied the chance to bail out from a series of disasters at PCCW, evil sub-genius Richard Li, the Mini-Me to Li Ka-Shing, AKA Master of All He Surveys, put his plan, cunningly called “The Plan,” into action.

From his lair of semi-evil off, aka “Cyberport,” he was going to hold the world ransom for 100 billion Hong Kong dollars. He let it be known that he would assassinate the President of the United States unless he was paid this ransom. This plan backfired when he received higher offers to actually carry out the deed.

So he then went with his other plan, strategically known as “The Other Plan.” His target: the interweb, uh, world wide wub, uh, that thingie that people pay me lots of money so they can look at porn. He would threaten to destroy Asia’s access to the inter-thingamabob unless they ponied up 100 billion Hong Kong dollars (or unless sales seriously started to increase on NOW-TV’s home shopping channel). The inter-whang seemed like a good target because someone told him that a friend of someone who worked for him who actually used the globe wide web once said that people were saying mean things about him there.

He placed a small thermonuclear device at a central communications junction on the ocean bed just off the coast of Taiwan. He was going to threaten to detonate the device unless he received his money or Bai Ling’s mobile number.

On the morning of December 27th, his mobile phone rang. Usually one of his semi-evil minions would answer it for him, but they were all on another mission – waiting in line to get him a full set of new collectible Hello Kitty key chains at 7-11. So he had to answer the phone himself.

“Hmmm, I wonder how that’s done?” he thought as the ringtone played his favorite tune, “If I Ruled the World.” He picked up the phone and tried smacking it with his head, but that didn’t work. He slammed it down on the desk, smashing his thumb but at the same time hitting the Big Red Button of Doom that detonated the device.

“Curses! Foiled again! Just wait till next time, I’ll get you yet, you wascally wabbit!”

Holy crap. I’ve managed to hit blogger but we’ll see if I’m able to publish or not after I’m done.

As many of you already know, the earthquake in Taiwan has affected phone and internet services in HK and other parts of Asia. It’s simply astonishing to me that in “this day and age” this sort of thing isn’t anticipated and planned for. I would expect that the financial impact is going to be in the millions if not even billions (at least in HK$) of dollars. PCCW of course will get a free ride on this because if anyone with any weight behind him points a finger at them, Richard Li will just go crying to daddy.

Others more technically inclined than I might find it interesting that throughout the day, while I’ve been unable to hit most servers in North America, I’ve had no problem receiving, reading and sending email via my gmail account. And while DNS seems to be working for the most part, even though most web sites time out before loading, it can’t seem to find yahoo.com at all.

This whole thing is extra super frustrating because there were some very specific things that I wanted to accomplish today that will remain undone, and tomorrow I’m out of here. I was also going to upload some pictures of HK hidden in smog that I’d taken last week and finally transferred from the camera to the PC, but I don’t think that’s gonna work today. Such is life.

As I head down to Thailand, things in my life are a bit messier than normal. For one thing, as previously mentioned, my cold and/or flu is back with me. Nothing like taking a little holiday trip when ill. And there are other complications as well.

I know I moan a lot and as I’ve already said, almost all of my problems are of my own making. Being fully self-aware of that, I should state for the record that I do not have total confidence that I will return from this trip as half of a couple with T. She’s done several things over the past couple of days that have really pissed me off and I am waiting until we are together to discuss them with her. There are a lot of big points in her favor as well and I will be taking that into consideration. But several external events are also making me wonder if it is wise to continue in this fashion.

At any rate, I’ll have my laptop with me and I’m staying in places that have internet, so blogging will continue while on the road. I’ll be splitting my time between Si Racha and Bangkok, with the possibility of a side trip to Ayutthaya or maybe someplace else. I’ve been combing the Real Thai food blog for suggestions on new food to try and new places to try it.

A couple of hours ago, T sent an SMS asking if I was home. I was, so responded by calling her.

I’m getting a cold again, or the one I had never went away and is flaring up, so I was sniffing on the phone. The conversation went something like this:

Me: sniff, sniff, cough

Her: Why you cry? Someone break your heart?

Me: No, I have a cold again, my nose is all stuffed.

Her: Who break your heart?

Me: No, no one broke my heart, I’ve got the flu.

Her: It’s okay if you want to break up with me, I don’t mind.

And more along those lines.

After we got off the phone, she sent an SMS: “Why u cry? Who is break u heart? … or I’m just only the pass of u life and only pass of u heart?”

Well, I haven’t quite figured out that last bit but I replied by saying that I wasn’t crying, that my nose is stuffed because I have a cold, and she replied by saying I should get some rest and take some pills, so I guess she finally got it.

No, I’m not cynical enough to (completely) believe this. But as in all the best humor, it has the ring of truth. Excerpted from this post at Thailand Stories:

Hi there. Its thaiexpert here again. Sooner or later in your relationship with your ‘Thai cutie’ will come the all-important occasion of ‘meeting the family’. Much of your future happiness will depend upon this meeting, so pay careful attention!

When you first meet ‘papa’ (literal translation: the swamp sucking scum who sent his daughter off to bonk fat farangs so he could stay home and drink mekhong all day) and ‘mama’ (literal translation: holy f*ck this is what my girl will look like in 30 years time) it is important that you give them considerable respect. Small gifts such as fruit (wrapped in money), candy (wrapped in money) or flowers (wrapped in money) are appreciated, although ‘papa’ (TSSS……) may greatly appreciate something in a bottle (wrapped in money).

As a ‘farang’ (lit trans :’sucker’) ‘mama’ (HFTIW……) and ‘papa’ (TSSSW….) will be looking to see if you are ‘jai dee’ (lit trans: ‘open wallet’) and good enough for their little ‘Lek’, ‘Noi’ or ‘Pae’ (lit trans: money bank). You maybe lucky enough to meet other members of the family such as ‘pii chai’ (lit trans: thai husband she has not told you about) and her much younger ‘nong chai’ and ‘nong sao’ (lit trans : her kids that she has not told you about). Make good friends with these little bundles of joy, as you can be sure that you will hear about every adventure in their lives from sickness (lit trans : pay money) to education (lit trans : pay money) to their marriage (lit trans : pay money).

“Oh my.” That was my reaction on seeing on CNN that James Brown had passed away. Other HK bloggers have also noted this. Brown was easily the creative equal of 20th century music giants Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis … anyone you’d care to name. As a singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, producer and as a live performer, he had very few peers. Bit o’ trivia – we shared the same birthday (though he was 21 years older than me). (Other famous people born the same day include Machiavelli, Golda Meir, Bing Crosby, Pete Seeger, Ben Elton.)

I never saw JB live in concert but have an armful of his CDs. The best place to start for someone who wants to see what all the fuss was about would be the expanded editions of his seminal 60s live albums, Live at the Apollo volumes 1 and 2. This was the man at his peak, live, working it for an audience that would not accept anything other than balls-to-the-wall sweaty dirty hot music. There’s also a 4 CD boxed set called Star Time that has all of his significant tracks. There’s probably a decent one or two disc compilation via Polygram/Universal out there as well.

Sadly, what I consider to be the best example of James Brown live is no longer available commercially. 20 or 30 years ago, “The T.A.M.I. Show” was available on VHS. This 1965 concert film featured an astonishing array of talent – Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Jan & Dean, Marvin Gaye, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Smokey Robinson, the Supremes and the Rolling Stones. It was pulled from release because the rights hadn’t been properly negotiated with all of the artists, and apparently they’ve never been able to resolve that situation since.

(There was a subsequent, edited release that had highlights from this concert plus the following year’s “Big TNT Show” and it does include James Brown footage but I don’t know how much. Big TNT Show had a lot of great groups as well – including the Byrds and Ike & Tina Turner but also one of the all-time most horrible moments in rock history – Phil Spector playing piano behind Joan Baez caterwauling her way through “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” – it has to be seen to be believed.)

But the clear performance winner was James Brown. This is the performance that has so often been parodied since then, his stage routine where he breaks down, a friend comes by, drapes a cape on his shoulders, starts to lead him offstage, only for Brown to start dancing, shake off the cape, run back to the microphone and wail again.

I guess I’m gonna have to dig out that tape and convert it over to DVD one of these days.

And tonight I’ll hoist up one or two in his memory.