Home Sweet Home

Before returning to fabulous, glamorous places, let’s stop off in Sakon Nakhon, the place I’ve called home for three months now. Sakon Nakhon is in Isan, which is a massive region in Northeast Thailand characterized by super friendly people, small cities, and a strong Lao influence. Sakon Nakhon is the capitol of Sakon Nakhon province, but only boasts about 70,000 people, and feels smaller. I love it. 

I have good friends here! My bestie is Kate, a gregarious goofball from Michigan. She’s incredibly friendly (we joke that she’s running for mayor because when we’re out around town she says hello to everyone) and has made my time here immeasurably more fun than if I had been here alone. I’m lucky to have her.

Such a nerd.

Also, Ben! Ben and Kate met in college, became buddies, and came to Thailand together. Ben and I also have a blast. 

Ben is the dude in this picture. Also introducing Kate's cleavage.

He’s a sweetie, and has an sharp scientific mind that makes for good conversation while hanging over the balcony of our apartment building. 

How can this not make you want to talk about stem cell research?

To the right in that photo is Carinne,  a liberal Texan who Ben met and fell in love with in Phuket, and is often in Sakon Nakhon because her job in Bangkok (which she recently quit- woo!)  was absolutely horrible. So we get to hang with her sometimes!

Thai friends! Ben met Thon while looking for apartments (here on the left with his friend Doo).

Represent. 

Thon speaks superb English, and until he left to go south and translate for the U.S. Military (which he does whenever they're training in Thailand - his English is that good), he was our main man in Sakon Nakhon. We miss him and hope that he comes home soon, although Kate and I plan to visit him while he's translating for attractive American men in uniform... In any case, we would have been adrift much longer without him there to show us the best things in town. 

Speaking of which! The following are all within five minutes of our apartment building:

The largest lake in Thailand, which is incredibly beautiful:

It's much bigger than this, but the lake stretches to the east from us, so this is a sunset view of a sort of inlet thing. 

An adorable coffee shop where they know us by name:

 where you can get this:

Ignore the cupcake in the background. I have no idea how that got there. 

A gorgeous park full of flowers built around a pond:

Photo courtesy of Carinne, who has spent more time there while we're in school than I will ever have the opportunity to.

A fabulous, gilded wat:

This is, incidentally, where I watched a full lunar eclipse. 

We get from place to place by bicycle (jak-gra-yan in Thai, in case you were wondering). Kate and Ben and I terrorize this town on our bikes- we're a regular farang bicycle gang. We tear through the alleys and frighten unsuspecting Thais when we pop out on the street (Kate: "Hello!! Sawadee-kha! Sabaidee baw kha? Gin khao young?").

 I’m in love with my bicycle. I want to ship it home to the U.S.

My precious. 

Biking another fifteen minutes brings us out of the suburbs for scenic views and encounters with local fauna:

The Thai word for "stupid" is the same as "buffalo", and these vacant stares demonstrate why. 

Homeward bound. 

Maybe they're not stupid- this momma seems to be contemplating the sunset. 

And just the other day we went out aimlessly biking and stumbled on the ruins of a tenth century, Khmer influenced wat.

Same era as Angkor Wat- no big deal. 

Just another day in Sakon Nakhon. 

A Few Scattered, Barely Connected Notes about Phuket, in Which I Lie to My Mother

I miss Phuket. I mostly spent the month I was there trying to come to terms with the fact that I was in Thailand, which didn’t become at all real to me until the third week, despite eating dinner every night looking at this: 

 and this:  

Our hotel was really out of the way at the southern tip of the island, and we had to take a tuk-tuk, which is basically a big pick-up truck outfitted with benches, to get anywhere.

En route to Patong. We have no idea what we're in for. 

At first I thought that an inconvenience, but after a few excursions  to more traveled areas of the island like Patong:

This is a tame picture. The whole place is basically a brothel. 

I found that I preferred it that way.


Our hotel had some sweet little touches, like this ...basin? Massive vase? Thingie?...

...where women would sit once a week placing tiny blossoms in the water:

in various designs.

Just outside the hotel was a spirit house.

I've since learned that these are found all over Thailand, outside private residences, office buildings, schools, and even big box stores. They’re based on the vestiges of a belief that by building in a certain place, you’re displacing spirits who already live there. If you don’t want bad things to happen to you, you build them a house of their own and bring them offerings of rice, sugary drinks, water, incense, and all the other things spirits apparently enjoy.

Spirits are thirsty.

There were cats and dogs wandering all over the little community supported by the two hotels on our beach. Some of the dogs were friendlier than others, and the friendly ones sometimes came to hang out with us when we were lounging on the beach during the day or singing Bob Marley off-key in the evenings. I made friends with this one, and called her Lucy. 

Pitbull/ corgi mix, maybe? Cuteness. 

She was a sweetie.

One Sunday I rented a motorbike (which I may or may not have promised my mother I wouldn’t do) to explore the island a little bit. I didn’t get incredibly far, since every time I came to a road that was more than two lanes I panicked and turned around and went back the way I came, but I followed the coast south:

and then north,

climbing steep hills on this incredibly girly, not at all kickass motorbike.

I saw some nice houses

 and some not-so-nice houses

 and other sweet stuff.

And just to prove that mothers are always right even when they're halfway around the world, I did indeed crash my motorbike.

Carnage. 

Thank goodness I was wearing a helmet. 

At Long Last: The Night Market

So, clearly this post is long, long overdue. I was thinking for a while that I wouldn’t launch into an account of my travels between my time in Phuket and where I am now (living and teaching a smallish city called Sakon Nakhon near the Lao border) and would instead tell you about small town life, but that’s not coming together as quickly as planned. Really, you can take this as an indication of how things work in terms of timing in Thailand: everything is always late, and you’ll end up sitting around, not even sure what you’re waiting for, and when it arrives it’s usually not what you expected. So all this delay is actually part of my larger, over-arching strategy to make you feel what Thailand is like on a daily basis.  (Did anyone fall for that? No? Ok, moving on.)

Night markets! Markets are one of my favorite things about Thailand. In larger cities they’re massive, and the food and goods there are extraordinary.  It’s basically just a big feast for the senses. 

Phuket Night Market

 Choose one of the lanes of vendors and you’ll walk through a cloud of perfume where people are hawking factory-second brand name cosmetics, duck under wildly patterned tie-dye beach dresses deliberately hung  in your way, be assaulted by the pounding base of an illegally downloaded CD, and happily down the sample of sweet Thai wine thrust into your hand (and then probably buy three bottles which you have to lug around from stall to stall for the rest of the night without breaking-  avoid this).

Chiang Mai Night Market

The first thing you want to do is hit the food section. No one shops well on an empty stomach. 

 Spend a little time just walking around. Check out the freshest fruits and vegetables, some of which I've never seen before.

What are those giant bean things? Awesome, that's what.

Supa fresh.

 By then you'll have picked up at least one edible. When I first went to the night market in Phuket my friend Roisin and I spent the majority of our time in the food area. We circled it at least four times.

Eat everything.

How good does that look?

Ok, maybe don't eat everything. This looks questionable.

If it looks spicy, it is SPICIER THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.

Seaweed balls are the bomb.

OK, I didn't try absolutely everything. 

Uh- what?

No. Just no.

Hell no.

Especially when there's a massive wok of pad thai to be had, free of insects (mostly, probably).

Your last buy in the food section should be something on a stick. It’s helpful when pointing to which tie-die dress you want or gesturing emphatically with while haggling. 

Decisions, decisions.

Then go check out what they have for sale. I was unable to take a lot of photos of the non-edibles, because for some reason people in Thailand hate when you take photos of the things they’re selling, even in big stores. They’ll post signs that forbid it and announce it over loudspeakers. I have no idea why. But I managed to get a few photos of random things:


You’ll find these everywhere. They’re actually soap, painstakingly carved to look like flowers.

Any town of considerable size has motorbike taxis. It's an easy, cheap, and sometimes terrifying way to get around. Don't ask your driver to drag race with the taxi next to him at 3 am in Chiang Mai- he'll do it, and once they hit 65 mph the thing starts to shudder and rattle under you like it's about to come apart. Just so you know. In any case, these are models of those little taxis made out of aluminum cans.

The sharp edges make these especially good toys for children.

And of course, the best impulse buy of all, a puppy!

A husky in Thailand? Seriously?

I have no ending for this post, so we’ll end with a puppy, however misplaced. A puppy is always a good note to end on.