These, my friends, are what perfect mangoes look like. We go through 10 or 12 a week, smoothies galore!
Rambutan. Stumbled across them a bit in literature over the years, but never knew what one looked like till coming here
Not much flavor, but juicy with a small pit inside. Rambutan are kind of fun to say & eat... every time I sit down to enjoy a bowl, the cracking open of bristled peel reminds that I'm not in Holland anymore
In Holland we can't buy 8 stems of orchids for 40 baht... just over a dollar! Ry still doesn't enjoy visiting local open markets here, as the smells can about knock one over, but picking out fresh flowers makes it more tolerable. A few days ago little ones there were following her around, wanting to touch her golden braids. Some kiddos had peanuts in the shell and Ry was amused by their shelling technique of setting them on the ground & stomping with their barefoot heel to open... harder on the feet than simply handing to mom & asking please, but moms here have mangoes & orchids to move at market
The healing knee
It's not a cobra. Last weekend my friend watched gardeners RUN madly (gardeners here don't usually run... it's part of that surviving-the-heat thing), whacking at this 2m long serpent on the rough they'd just cut on her backyard golf course. After they killed it, this guy swung it over his head like a lasso. There's a decent chance he brought it home & ate it, seriously. Pink trucks & taxis are common here
So are peachy sunsets we see most evenings
Thailand is restless, and red shirts are rising. Things remain quiet by us. The heated protesting is almost entirely in Bangkok, a huge expanse of city where trouble has been localized to a few areas. Protests are also uniting in Khon Kaen, the impoverished area in the north where we visited at Christmas. None of this is new to Thailand and some feel it will blow over, possibly with another coup as is the pattern here. A unique concern with this uprising is the King's health. He's been ailing in hospital for months, and worry is that opportunity could be ripe for major unrest & anarchy. Long live the King, but still problems remain.
We've been talking with the girls and drawing parallels to the French Revolution to help them understand. Largely poor, rural red shirts are the hungry French peasants storming Versailles. We are exposing the girls to wonderful and not so wonderful things. Opportunities to learn. But how much do we just let them be kids & not bog them down with heaviness that abounds? And how much do we challenge them to genuinely care, form founded opinions and perhaps take action? Wish it was spelled out in a chapter of that perfect parenting book for which we all long, but does not exist.
A beautiful read that does exist is Monsoon Country by Pira Sudham. I finished it last week on holiday. It explores the divide between poor, rural Thailand and wealthy West, and is set a generation before my own, but has timelessness.
I'm often asked, what is the hardest thing about living in Thailand? The heat is a strong contender, but witnessing & experiencing massive socioeconomic disparity is a true challenge, even from our privileged vantage. Vacationing a few weeks in poor, desperate places is so vastly different from living there. I wasn't expecting those differences to hit me with such intensity.
We are days from arrival of monsoonal rains. I feel them looming as skies have grown heavy with occasional downpours & distant thunder. A slew of new bugs are on the move & trying to reside in our house. Temperatures are on the final push of their upper limits. Heat hasn't seemed to affect the protests, Thais can take the heat and the rains. Motorbikers press through pounding showers, while pick-up trucks carry crouched, drenched people.
Politics & military history are filled with weather-affected outcomes. I hope these protests don't have the outcome of just blowing over with the change to an impossibly wet season... the 25 deaths of April 10 would be all the more senseless and sad. My hopes may be naive, but there are populations here that need respite from their economic storms cycling sure as the monsoon. Mayuri has been exploited to literal death. Palm & her community have barely a chance of breaking the slum pattern. And "unwanted" babies still fill Vietnam-era orphanages in this land of smiles where orchids are happy & mangoes are perfect.
