Haloranch

The earth and sky are welded together into a seamless white plate. The creek is grey and broken, like a shard of dirty glass. But the deck looks pretty with its fluffy white carpet. The warm comforting fragrance of homemade soup wafts through the house as it burbles on the stove. It's that kind of day.

We're back in Canada and as I sip my coffee this morning, I take a moment to savour it. Only during the last week in Thailand were we treated to the freshly dripped coffee to which we are accustomed. In the previous weeks the coffee was instant Nescafe. The cream was milk. The milk was suspect. It's the same story in Chile. In fact coffee isn't even called coffee. It's called Nescafe. I used to love instant coffee and I still like it. But I love freshly dripped coffee. It's good to be home.

Back in Jomtien, our afternoons passed languidly on the beach watching the vendors.

Not everyone walks on Walking Street in Pattaya.

There's an annual festival held by one of the local monasteries to raise money, which the monks then use for community improvements. It lasts several days, and happened to be on while we were there so we went for a look. Among the more unusual foods were these tiny little eggs and ordinary juices made more interesting with a backlight.

One day we heard that they were draining one of the freshwater shrimp lagoons just a few canals away from Bob and Sami's, so we rushed over to see what that was all about. It takes a few hours to drain, even with this mega pump. The water just goes into another canal. The shrimp are harvested, sorted, and sold. Sami had dispatched us to buy some fresh shrimp for dinner, which she cooked, peeled and turned into a deliciously creamy linguini sauce.

We saw hundreds, no thousands of orchids. And it was hot hot hot! When they come into the processing plant they arrive in large crates quickly dipped in an ice bath, then dipped into an insecticidal bath. Those that can take it are dipped into two different insecticidal baths. and then stacked up like this to be sold as cut flowers. I'm not really hiding. That's just a quick way to lose 20 pounds. Some fragrant blossoms arrive already plucked from their stems. These are woven into garlands, three blossoms per row each facing outward and every petal carefully fluffed out so it's not hidden behind another one. Something like 160 orchids are used per garland and they're worn for special occasions.

Lunch in the floating market. Here we are with our hosts Sami and Bob and their nephew Atom who was visiting with them for a few days before heading up country with a group of 43 other teens. This is how they cook in the floating market:

Spirit Houses are everywhere in Thailand. The purpose of the Spirit House is to provide an appealing shelter for the spirits, or celestial beings, who would otherwise reside in the heavens, in large trees, in caves and cliffs or waterfalls and other natural surroundings. According to folklore, the spirits themselves are either good or evil, but most are just finicky and mischievous, demanding respect from humans and capable of disastrous interferences if they don't get their way. The spirit of the land, for example, expects to be informed when a human intends to start a business or engage in improvements to an existing business. If the spirit is not informed, and if the human does not respectfully request permission, the spirit might cause the venture to fail. This Spirit House also seems to have attracted a more corporeal inhabitant.

The markets in Thailand set up where there's room. And where is there more room than in a parking lot? So... in front of the chedi (a Budhist monastery) we parked, on the street LOL, and walked through the market. This image caught my eye: two moms, two kids (there's one in between the moms, you can just make out her arm and hair) and a kiosk with naked, pale chickens. And those creepy delicacies. Literally.

We visited the summer palace of Ramas V and VI which is used today only for special functions. It's very close to the university and we saw a number of students jogging through the beautifully landscaped grounds. Here we are paying homage to Rama V. There's a volunteer who looks after the statue and provides incence sticks for a small fee. We each get 9 incense sticks to burn. There's a whole ceremony which he conducts in Thai, and we repeat after him. And finally, I just love when Hans takes pictures of signs like this!

We're leaving on Day 1 of the rainy season. This morning we are sittig in the gazebo on the canal as the rain buckets down on three sides. Below are views of the house, gazebo and canal taken before the rain. The constant cacophony of thunder echoes above and all around us, rolling off into the distance. Lightening flashes like a strobe and lights the dim white sky. Someone up there is taking flash photos. A family of monitor lizards emerges one by one fromt their nest under the house and swim slowly along the banks of the canal hunting for breafast. Big daddy measures an impressive 4' from tip to tail. We feasted on a breakfast of dim sum and fresh mangoes in the gazebo where the rain had dropped the temperature by nearly 20 degrees. I'm guessing because no one uses thermometers here. It's either hot, or very hot, or not so hot. The rain also brought out hundreds of flying termites. The are was filled with them but if they had the misfortune of landing somewher...

The other morning Bob rented a long James Bond style boat for the morning. The driver/ pilot picked us up at our front door. How cool is that. This is because Thailand has long been known as the Venice of Asia and Bob and Sami's property sit on one of the canals. It took maybe 30-40 minutes to get to the Floating Market but the whole time was so enjoyable because right and left there were houses and people to see. So much more fun than taking a boat on the sea where there's nothing but water all around. We look lots of photos - to be uploaded when we're back cause I'm not on our own computer. Got saffron and a few little souvenirs at the market, and then we had lunch. Sami picked our meal from one of the boat vendors and it was delivered steaming hot to our table: a wet soup and dry soup. Same ingredients in both only one had hot water and one didn't. Both were delicious. Our boat driver waiting for us and when it was time to head back, he dropped Sami, Ha...

After our tour of Muan Borang, it's time to eat. We're south of Bangkok and we're heading parallel to the ocean. We can't see it, but we know it's there off to our right somewhere and we're looking for a seafood restaurant on the water. Finally, Bob spots a connecting road and we whip across traffic (we drive on the let here). The road doesn't look promising except that it's going in the right direction, and it's very narrow. One lane only. There's an oncoming vehicle and Bob is hard pressed to find a place wide enough to squeeze over so the other car can pass. But we soldier on knowing the ocean isn't too far ahead. Rickety dwellings line either side of the street, close enough to touch. children dart in front and behind us clearly unused to seeing an SUV with 3 white aces. Finally we see the water. the tide's out and the exposed beach is covered with hundreds of bamboo poles sticking straight up out of the sand.d Hundreds. S...

Traffic in Bangkok is unlike bumper to bumper traffic in Calgary, but fairly similar to rush hour traffic in Manila. We left 2 ours prior to our lunch meeting at the Rotary Club of Bangkok, chartered by James Wheeler Davidson from our District in 1930. However, once we ht the downtown lunch hour traffic, we were crawling. We moved by inches. Literally. And since we happened to be travelling directly underneath an elevated road, if also quite effectively blocked the GPS signal Bob was trying to receive. And the GPS lady was confused when we did get the signal so she gave us wrong distances. In the end, however, we arrived at our destination slightly late but it didn't really matter. Once we signed in on their sheet which is specifically for out of country visiting Rotarians, it was rushed to the MC who was just introducing other visitors. He brought the mike over to me so I got a chance to tell everyone that Hans and I were from JWD's district, which news was met with ent...

Almost all pop is served in old fashioned glass bottles. Sometimes cans are available, as in Coke Light, but you can't get it everywhere. that would be because everyone here is thin. that would also explain why no packaged Thai food products show any kind of calorie values on them . They don't need to know and don't care. This year in Thailand it's 2551. Being a primarily Buddhist country,nit obviously makes no sense for the Thais to chart their calendars after Christ. Instead they count their years from when Buddha reached enlightenment at the age of 36. This is now 2551 years after his Enlightenment. He died a natural death around 52. The urinal in one restaurant was at chin level. This meant you either had to sit sideways on the throne - a preferable option, or, stare into the urinal. If you have to parallel park anywhere, you park within inches of the car in front of you and leave your car in neutral. Then, if any of the cars have to leave, the attendant p...