An Open Letter to the Man Down the Street Who Feels the Need to Incessantly Blast Loud Music From His Truck

Dear Man Down the Street Who Feels the Need to Incessantly Blast Loud Music From His Truck,

We have never actually met, so I understand that this letter may catch you by surprise. There is, of course, the language barrier, as well as many other reasons we are not close friends, but I felt it was time for some communication between us.

I have noticed that you enjoy communicating with the neighborhood via the unusual method of your truck's sound system. I applaud you for the unique nature of such a form of communication, but I feel I must ask: what exactly are you trying to say?

Many afternoons, after you get home from (I assume) work, you spend several minutes trying out the different horn sounds your truck possesses. At first, I thought the truck was new, and you were trying everything out. I understand the excitement of a new truck with new sounds, and of course you have to enjoy the new sounds while they're still fresh. But it's been several months now and you still do this regularly, Man Down the Street Who Feels the Need to Incessantly Blast Loud Music From His Truck, so it can't be just novelty any more. And your truck is parked, so you can't be warning animals or small children that you're about to run them over. I doubt you would need a siren to do that anyway.

So, I'm at a loss to explain that, Man Down the Street Who Feels the Need to Incessantly Blast Loud Music From His Truck. But if it were only that, I don't think I'd mind so much. After all, we're all allowed a few peccadilloes, and if honking your horn makes you happy, who am I to quibble? It's really the other stuff that irrationally irritates me.

For starters, who told you that the neighborhood was your personal living room? Everyone else listens to music inside their houses. Not you. You use your truck to provide us all with the same Top Ten Thai Pop songs, over and over. I can hear them from inside my house, and I live a half a block away, so I can't even begin to imagine what kind of hearing loss you must be suffering from to tolerate the sound right next to your truck.

Now, I tried not to mind, especially when this was confined only to the afternoons. I tried to see it as music you conveniently provided for me while I watered the garden. Of course, I would have preferred to listen to my iPod while watering, but you had no way of knowing that. And I certainly do know the melodies of a lot more popular Thai songs now.

But the kicker, Man Down the Street Who Feels the Need to Incessantly Blast Loud Music From His Truck, is that you have started to do this at night. No, not Friday night, or Saturday night, until midnight or shortly after. Even that I would attempt to condone. No. You have started, for NO GOOD REASON, because a good reason for this cannot exist, you have started to play your insanely loud truck music at 3, 4, and 5 am, DURING THE WEEK!!! I wake up in my bedroom and put the pillow over my head to shut out the noise, and I hope that whatever ghosts you are trying to scare away leave quickly. But they don't. Usually, you play your music for an hour or more.

So really, I am writing this letter to ask you one question. Why?

WHY???????

Yours, very sincerely,

The Foreign Woman Down The Block From You Who Enjoys Peace and Quiet

(This letter is inspired by, but not plagiarized from http://mcsweeneys.net/links/openletters/. Check theirs out. Very good browsing the internet on a lazy afternoon reading.)

Mouse the Cat

As many of you know, I think, Evan and I have recently adopted a cat. Or, a kitten to be more precise. She was living at the school, as so many homeless animals do, living off the food the kids drop at lunch. In Thailand, very few animals are euthanized, and even fewer are spayed or neutered, so there are a lot of animals living on the streets, looking the worse for wear and tear.

You might remember a picture of a kitten in the blog several months ago. I think what I said was that I wanted to take her home from the school, and Evan was saying no at the time. Fast forward a few months, I saw her again, weak from malnutrition, and tormented by the kids, but still friendly and gentle. Evan made the huge mistake of telling me we could take her home at the end of the day if she was still sitting outside the teachers room at school.

She was. So we brought her home, fed her, gave her a bath (she hated that part), and she's been here ever since. That was about a month ago. Here's a picture of her for size comparison, Evan's shoes are in the background, about 6 inches away from her.


Here's a pic Evan took of her. She has amazing eyes.


And another I took.


Crashed out.

It's amazing how civilized she looks with her collar on.


Here's a pan shot I took of her, still a little blurrier than I would like, but it shows how fast she can move. After she started getting food regularly and put some more meat on her bones she's become very energetic. She loves to attack things, and we're working on getting her to put that aggression into toys and nonliving things, instead of our hands or feet. She's learning quickly, but it's still a process.




To keep allergies down and to keep her clean, we've been bathing her every few weeks. Considering how much she hates it, she behaves pretty well, mostly sitting there stoically, waiting it out. Here are a couple shots of her wet. Check out that pink tongue!






That's all for now, check us out soon for another post. If you have questions about life in Thailand you want us to answer on the blog, post them as comments. I think we'll be doing a question and answer post in the next couple of weeks.

A Word Or Two On How To Use The Blog

Two things to note:

1) All pictures become much bigger when you click on them. Want a closer view of something? Try it out.

2) I have sometimes embedded helpful links in the text, like this one. That happens to be Evan's favorite news site, by the way. Look back through my posts and see if you can find them. I especially like the songtaew link.

That's all! Happy reading!

The End of Our Travels

Come out to the beach with us for Part 4, the final part of our four part series detailing our island idyll.

Make yourself comfortable. Pull up a chair.
That inviting view is in front of our bungalow on Koh Lanta, the next stop on our expedition. To get there we took the overnight boat Evan posted a picture of in the last blog. We arrived in Surat Thani at 4:30 in the morning, were taxied to the bus station, and waited there for our 6:00 am bus to Krabi, on the other coast of Thailand. In fact, as is characteristic of all Thailand travel, it wasn't actually a bus, but instead a van. Hardened travellers by this point, we just threw our bag on top of the van with the others, and squished in. We got to Krabi around 8:30, at which point we had to decide what to do: stay in Krabi, see the town, go to a beach nearby, or go to one of the nearby islands. We weren't really in the mood for crowded beaches or small towns, so we decided to go to Koh Lanta, which was about a two hour van ride away. We arrived at Klong Khong beach, grabbed a room in a bungalow, and headed for the water.

Unfortunately, the water was about two feet deep, and the bottom was all rocks. We thought perhaps that it was low tide, but actually it was high tide, and at low tide the beach was all rocks. Still, we did get a little swim in.

Here are a couple more beach pictures:










Other than the beach, the most exciting thing we did on the island was a little spelunking. We figured, it's for tourists, so it must be pretty gentle. I wore flip flops and a dress, which may have been a mistake.

Before we went into the cave we had to wait a little while for a guide to become available. Here are some pictures I took in the meantime. The light was very interesting and misty.







Now, onto the cave. It was pretty amazing, with several rooms and one passageway we literally had to crawl through on our bellies. I was very glad not to be claustrophobic! My dress may have been a little worse for wear though, as you can see here.
Fortunately it all came out in the next wash.

In the cave were some requisite bats.

Some spiders the size of my hand. (Our guide asked us, kindly, if we were 'scary of spiders.' We said no. But I still was glad we didn't have to get too close to any of the ones we saw on the cave walls.)

Some stalactites and stalagmites.


And, this is not from the cave, it's just a little something we found on our pillow one night after we came home from walking on the beach. Makes you feel right at home, doesn't it? Notice how it managed to make its way into the mosquito netting.
Here's a picture of a rubber tree plantation on Koh Lanta, which we passed on our way to the caves.
And a few random trees and bits of green grass for all you winter sufferers to rest your weary eyes upon. That's it for our travels, regular blogs will start up again soon, we promise.