Things you can do with a bike

 Carry a bamboo plant.                 

 Get Aik to fix Susan's second flat in 2 days.

 Go for a Boxing Day ride with Meredith and Cate

and then eat lots of good food at T Corner

Go for another ride on December 30.  This is the south loop with the mountains of Burma in the background.

 Eat a gigantic breakfast at Sweet Harmony in Mae Sot with Meredith and Nat

Surprise! Happy Birthday, Thant!

Thant, the one-and-only source of much wisdom at Ban Thai Guest House ( our home for 2 years ) doesn't know when his actual birthday is, so we celebrate it on January 1.  This year, because Wendy and Andrew were here from Australia, we celebrated last night, December 29.  Wendy and Andrew's parents arrived with a large cake, then Andrew went back to Ban Thai and managed to get Thant here without giving away anything.

Surprise!

Julie brought flowers, Bo Bo brought oranges, Sein Sein Lin and Nwe Nwe brought fish soup and curry, and we supplied potato and chicken curry, rice, and drinks.  Coke 0 proved the most popular!

SSL's son

Andrew and Wendy

Nat and Julie

Nwe Nwe presents the cake

Thant gets some help blowing out those candles!

Thant and Bo Bo

Sein Sein Lin and cake

Wendy, Julie, Susan

Andrew and his Mum and Dad

Mg Mg Tin

Toad Hall?

This beast was lying in wait in our kitchen when we came back from dinner a couple of nights ago.  I screamed, Nat got a broom and the hose and after much to-ing and fro-ing, managed to shoo him out!

Eeeeek!

Home again, home again, jiggety jog...

Although it was mostly jiggety when we arrived at our Mae Sot house at 6 am on December 7.  Somehow our tenant had changed the padlocks.  What to do?  Wake our neighbor Chris out of a soundsleep  and get him to bring us the new keys.  Thank you, Chris!

And our orchids welcomed us home by blooming!

Wedding bells

The formal portrait

SSL and Nge Nge

SSL and son, Wanna Zaw, Hla Hla, BoBo

These are Nat's photos of Wanna Zaw and Hla Hla's wedding reception at Borderline.  Sein Sein Lin cooked all the food.

Life on the soi/ part 1

So all my plants died and our friend Cate took me to the market to buy more.  Plant lady decided what I was buying... so we now have some green bits on the front porch.

Green bits

Plant lady

You want to buy that one???

 

btw... total lunar eclipse on december 10, 2011

Life on the soi/part 2

Give Nat some PVC pipe and watch him go to town.  He replaced the single bed mosquito net we had been fighting with for a year with a double bed net mounted on an artisanal frame!!

And then there is the laundry.  Our clothes have all been marked with little pieces of bright orange. or in the case of Nat's socks, pink yarn....

'English' laundry ticket

Our living room

Sein Sein Lin at Puzzlebox Studio

Many of you will remember Sein Sein Lin's visit to Nova Scotia last summer.  She is now home in Mae Sot, working as an artist at the Puzzlebox Studio.  There is a potter and a glass artist on staff as well as SSL.  Here she is giving a lesson in batik to Sandy Shum, a friend and fellow artist.

Drawing the design on fabric

Melting wax

Sandy applies wax which acts as a resist

It's tricky... hard to control the wax flow

Applying color

Background color is added

Note the bed frame used to hold the fabric taut.

Applying background color quickly!

Now the fabric will be allowed to dry; then it will be boiled to remove the wax.  Stay tuned!

Sauna, Thai style

Whenever I feel a cold coming on, or overdo it on the bike, I take myself down the street to a sauna that is part of a wat compound.  This is a very low tech affair:  wood fired, the room is probably 10 x 12, with 2 wobbly slatted benches down the long sides.  The 'door' is a piece of fabric and it's more of a steam room than a dry sauna. 

After stuffing 20 baht into a big wooden box, I go to the changing area, which is part of the sauna/'gym' (see below) roofed over structure.  There I try to get out of my clothes and wrapped in a longyi withoug displaying too much flesh.  Not easy!

The sauna is open from 3 to 7 pm every day, but if you get there before 4, the fire hasn't heated the room enough.  When you pull aside the curtain and step in, you can't see anything because of the steam.  Hands will reach out and guide you to a spot and the proceed to poke you and ask questions in Burmese or Thai, depending on the nationality of the speaker.  After giving my name, age, and nationality, I relapse into sweating.  The other women keep up a steady stream of talk, dressed in longyis AND bras, sometimes for younger women it's a T shirt and shorts.   Periodically, I stagger out to  deliciously cool air, every once in a while receiving an herbal drink the color of rust and tasting about the same.  'It's good for you, drink it all!' I am commanded by one or another of the Thai/Burmese ladies.

After an hour, I've sweated out my aches, so I reverse the process of putting on clothes while holding the longyi in place.  Usually one or more items end up on the concrete floor.  Then it's out through the 'gym' where middle-aged Thai men are using what looks like home made wooden equipment to do ab crunches, arm excercises, push ups, and engage in long conversations before heading back to their sauna.

It's lovely!

Looking from the change room to the pipe feeding the sauna with heat

View down the alley leading from the wat to street