Hot April days

Our neighbor caught a snakehead fish in the canal in our backyard.

He and his daughter prepare to release it into our pond.

This is near one of the temples on the western edge of the island.

Swimming near rickety wooden stairs at one of the piers.

Cremation.

 

Press-a-Card printing press

Today we went with Fabien and Nico to visit Zoom from Press a Card

( I shot some pictures at his place two years ago, with my Afghan camera.)

And here, some color pix from the visit today.

Lots of letters and fonts.

Graphic exchange featured our house and island

http://www.graphic-exchange.com/00perso.htm

Panoramic view from our front balcony.

Click and scroll on the image to see our living room and jungle.

Biking around Bang Ko Bua

Island mapping

Landry is mapping the roads, sidewalks and little paths on the island. Ran into this  2-meter-long serpent, which our little 5-year-old neighbor very easily identified as a python. I asked her how she knew, and she looked at me like I was dumb. "By its patterns, of course!"

Sunset at the end of a path on the west of the island.

Landry's work featured in "Computer Arts"

Landry riding the Eiffel Tower on this bus billboard!

Garden Growing

A common tailorbird that had flown into the large window at the front of our house, knocked itself out, and then a few minutes later got up and flew off. We hope there are not too many bird accidents. If there are, we may have to rush to finish some curtains to give our flying friends a visual cue of the glass hazard. 

During last year's rainy season, we cut a few branches from neighbors' hibiscus plants, clipped off all the leaves, cut each branch to the length from my elbow to wrist, and then poked them into the wet mud to root. Less than a year later, they are leafy, and some have flowered! We hope to have a nice hibiscus hedge on the east side of our house, along the side with the public sidewalk.

The balcony railing by Landry and our friend Paul.

These orange birds of paradise started off as root stumps -- a gift from a neighbor at our old house. We put them in pots for a few years, and then planted them here under our shower, to drink up our soap and shampoo water from bathing. They are now about two meters tall and happy.

The "moke" bushes on the left are slowly adjusting to our clay-consistency earth. A few of the moke are leafy, others are flowering, but none look particularly happy yet. The plants on the right were mysteriously growing in all weird directions, but then we realized with a few of the bunches that really flourished that each sprout forms a fan of leaves around a central flowering stem.

The neighborhood cats are talented climbers. Spot the one way up in the tree?

This plant, "bua bok" (which translates to mean the lily on the shore), began as a little clump that I got from a coffee shop near our old house.

Rose apples on their way. These "chompu mah miaw" begin as fuzzy pink flowers.

Back in Phra Pradaeng

After a few months away, we are back home.

 Received in the mail a copy of A DAY magazine's February issue, with a feature on Landry.

  

We also came home to the hot and dry cicada season. It sounds like southern France. Villagers walk around with plastic bags at the end of long sticks to catch the cicadas, fry them up and eat them with a little Thai dipping sauce. One of the villagers told me that the male cicadas (in Thai called chakka-chan, which kind of sounds like Jackie Chan) make a lot of noise, but the females taste better because of the yummy eggs near their butts. We've yet to try this local delicacy.

Morning Bogor

Bogor, Indonesia

A friend invited me to come work for the Center for International Forestry Research, which is located on a beautiful campus amid gigantic rainforest trees. It is purported to be one of the rainiest cities in the world.

The forest is lush, but strangely, there is very little wildlife. We spotted a few snakes and scorpions, but otherwise very few birds. The houses in the nearby neighborhood, however, have lots of birds in cages.

Life around the river is beautiful, but unfortunately hygiene remains a problem. We once were admiring the view of a man wading through the shallow waters of the river, when he dropped his trousers and squatted. Definitely not an open defecation free zone. Another time that Landry crossed one of these foot bridges, he saw a man crossing with his jam-packed garbage bin. When he got to the middle of the bridge, he dumped his trash into the river. Also spotted in the river: people bathing and swimming.