Some photos by popular request

Well after the responses I’ve had from people I guess I will keep writing about random shit (but maybe I’ll try and ponder things a little more before I post them for my own piece of mind). However some good constructive criticism was to keep posts around 1000 words, and put more photos in so I’ll try and take that on board. Admittedly I have been a bit lax with photos. But I just don’t really like them!!!! But I have taken some with the intent of putting them up, and I want to make good of that intention so here goes. There’s a few up on Facebook as well here (I don’t think you need an account to view them).

These have been accumulated over the past little while, I hope you all enjoy :-). They’re not in any particular chronological order.

Actually the first I’ll write out because it was just a collection of quotes by famous people in the front of the menu in a vegetarian cafe near here:

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chance of survival on earth, as much as an evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Albert Einstein

Actually I’ll just write that one. There are some other good ones from people like Pythagoras and some other famous people, but I like Einstein. And yet I still eat meat. What a hypocrite.

This street runs along the side of the 3 Kings monument and shows how bad the pollution is here. In fact this is a good day, a lot of the time you can’t even see the hills at all. It does make for some quite nice sunsets though.

This is one of my dancing related injuries. I’m sorry if you have a foot phobia, I don’t really see the big deal. But I’m quite proud of them (there’s a matching one on the other big toe and a new one about that big on my heel as well).

Behold!! A Thai fresh produce market. They’re really good at fresh produce over here, you never get anything wilted despite the heat.

It turns out I’m quite good at food carving. A potato and a carrot.

Some more pretty flowers near my house.

My first attempt at home cooked mango sticky rice. It tasted pretty damn good I have to admit, although I didn’t have a bamboo steamer for the sticky rice so I had to boil it. It was still pretty sticky, but more in a custard way than a bread way. But that’s OK for mango sticky rice since you then cook it up with sugar and coconut cream anyway. I've since tried steaming the sticky rice in a bamboo steamer (which left it tasting funny), and a handkerchief which worked fairly well. But I don't really think it needs to be steamed when you're just going to add coconut milk for a rice pudding like this.

OK, here’s something I find really strange and funny all at once. I’ve noticed that a lot of the temples have what I can only describe as soft-core porn in amongst their artwork. It’s never explicit, but I’ve yet to find another explanation for some of the positions you find people in. This one is fairly tame, but it’s not that uncommon to see all sorts of groping going on, or threesomes. It’s really strange. This one just has some extremely optimistic topless Thai girls on it, floating above the Buddha statue in the middle. Buddha, boobies, Buddha, boobies.

Here is another one I found on the wall of a building.

A peanut I think. But I’ve never seen a raw one like this before. It’s quite pretty and tasty too. The flesh is actually mostly clear before they’re roasted.

Have a look at this mango!!! Notice the relative thickness of the pip comparative to the flesh. It’s almost nonexistent, while ours at home have humungous pips. Australian mangos == So lame, Thai Mangos == So good. I have found some of our thick pip variety over here, but these ones are much better.

A picture I shot on the way down the mountain around Doi Sutep (A big temple up here on a mountain). I find at this point that I didn’t include any pictures of the temple itself, but to be honest temples are kind of all same-same but different, and usually very touristy. You’ve seen 10 and you’ve seen them all, just on different scales. Visit Thailand and you’ll know what I mean. But THIS is pretty.

CHOCOLATE. That’s all. We got sick.

This is the Somtom Ninja near the Chiang Mai gate, which is the gate in the south of the old wall in Chiang Mai. Somtom is a traditional Thai seafood salad made with: Lots of chilli, garlic, dried shrimp, pickled whole crabs, fish sauce, other random seafood, green papaya, tomatoes, peanuts, and probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten. It’s really great so long as you don’t get the pickled crab. I tried that one time and it was hard to finish, especially with 10cm crab legs stabbing me in the tonsils. This guy makes the best somtom I’ve found yet, and he makes it super fast. Hence Somtom Ninja.

And that’s that. I hope you like them :-).

One thing I will talk briefly about though is a peculiar habit people have when they’ve got a camera. They’ll walk into a really beautiful place, snap a bunch of photos of everything for later, and then walk out without actually appreciating anything. I saw it happen a fair bit when I went up to Doi Sutep. I kind of feel like there are times when a camera is good, but photos are really artistic more than anything. Snapping a trillion photos of a temple or images of the Buddha is kind of silly because I think it completely misses most of the impact of actually being there. I guess I have nothing against taking photos of them, but surely it should remind you of how you felt when you were there. And if you don’t actually take the time to appreciate it at all in the moment then the photos are just like a postcard you can show to your friends rather than anything meaningful.

Actually another thing I feel compelled to say is: I rescind my assertion that Thai people are so healthy. They eat TONS of fried food ALL THE TIME. They will literally deep fry anything in batter, from bananas, to scorpions, to chickens feet. Somehow they don’t die from it like we do. But I think if you avoid the fried food the rest is pretty healthy.