Why bring any of it up here, one might wonder, since this isn't supposed to be a lifestyle blog. I do tend to talk through a bit of local daily life here in posts, since some of it is unique for occurring in Bangkok, with things just slightly different everywhere. But I've been letting the tea comparison posts run long and cutting that part back. Things have seemed a little mundane lately but I'll share the exceptions.
We were on the way to visit that one "family monk" when I was on that river ferry, who just went on an interesting trip himself to meet another religious figure.
Right; just amazing. Who meets the Pope? Oddly there really isn't more to say about that. He did. The Pope seems very friendly and pleasant in those pictures. Here's another picture, and one of ruins there. Monks sightseeing seems an odd theme, but then when in Rome...
More pictures of that river ferry experience, and of Bangkok from the river.
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it's like a bus, but without traffic jams |
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Wat Phra Kaew, the Grand Palace temple. I was visiting Wat Pho nearby. |
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parts of the riverside have a strange look, with buildings right at the edge |
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passing another boat |
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a better look at the inside |
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not related, just a Ganesh statue I walked by |
Thinking about the subject led me to consider where else I've lived that had local ferries. Baltimore did, across the Inner Harbor, and out from Fells Point where I lived; it's been a long time since I've lived there. We went on the Staton Island ferry in NYC on a visit early last year, but that was just a vacation. And that's most of what comes to mind. We end up on boats on vacations in different places, going out to Samui island in Thailand, or visiting Hanauma Bay in Vietnam, but using a boat for normal local travel is a different thing.
Trip to China (not me, my wife)
My wife just went to Shenzhen, China, alone. That was under the premise of getting her crashed phone's memory restored, but I think really just to get out. She passed through Hong Kong so took the opportunity to go over to Macau for a day to pick up egg tarts (which of course one would do by boat; that's a relatively nearby island). She's crazy; Hong Kong would have decent egg tarts around. The ones she bought are good, at least.
Even though this is a tea blog and she was in Hong Kong and mainland China the subject of tea doesn't come up. I told her to skip buying it, since she doesn't know tea well enough to judge what I like or if a version is good or not. She bought me a tisane version that looks like the dried fruit in a granola cereal; typical.
I asked her to share photos and had to settle for sending them to myself from her phone.
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I'm assuming this is Shenzhen |
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the same general place |
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My wife, in Guangzhou |
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This must be in Macau |
She made it to Hong Kong, onto Shenzhen, then Guangzhou, and in the end back through Macau. And didn't take many pictures for covering that much ground. I've been to all those places except Guangzhou. She met a friend there, my son's former best friend, who I can show in a picture from visiting back here two years ago after moving back to China:
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that's her on the left, Frenly, near her son Joe |
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Joe is on the left, my son on the right, Andy in the middle |
I feel like that trip theme never translated into a compelling story. It wasn't one; she went to China to run an errand and stretched it out a bit to sight-see.
One might wonder why I'm not writing about me doing solo trips to China to tea areas, if it's as simple as that, but it just never works out that way. We use up all the vacation time I get on outings to different places and I'm lucky when tea themes come up at all.
Rescuing a lizard
This was another odd event that came up recently, something minor, the kind of thing that wouldn't be familiar everywhere. I noticed a small house lizard was stuck to a baggage tag sticker. We call those geckos, after the Hawaiian name for them, even though they're not that, here called "jing joke."
I snapped his picture so I could get help finding him again, since I wasn't having luck pulling that off, and went to go find something to help with that.
We like those lizards; people here and in Hawaii do. Insects thrive in the tropics and they eat them, so they're not considered a pest at all. It's hard to say how many live in the house but based on how often we see them probably at least a half dozen (almost none compared to my college apartment in Hawaii, in Kaimuki), with a few in the kitchen too, which is built as a separate building.
Normally you can't get very close to them but he was impaired by the sticker so I could grab it, but my startle reflex wouldn't let me hold it while he pulled himself free. He would wiggle, then I would jerk. It wasn't working out and I was concerned about hurting him. I posted my son to watch him in case he walked off to find something to help; maybe with pliers I would end up jerking it around less.
Instead of pliers I decided to let my wife have a try at it. She doesn't seem to have much startle reflex, and bugs and the like don't freak her out at all. Even though I like the lizards that abstract like and one squirming around on the other end of a small sticker are two different things. Very slowly she grabbed the sticker, and much more calmly that lizard slowly pulled his arm off that sticker, then ran off.
It made for a nice symbolic victory, a chance to help someone out, if only a house lizard.
Singing and dancing
My daughter is into these subjects lately. Any four year old girl is likely to be, but she's been taking ballet and hip-hop dance, so all the more so in her case. I visited her hip-hop class to pick her up not long ago to pick her up, related to my wife being out of town and me being off work with an ear infection one day.
After that I was with her when she was playing and she did a version of the introductory lines of "Yellow Submarine" by the Beatles for me. Hearing the chorus was one thing, but she started with those initial lines one wouldn't usually remember, something like "in the town, where I was born, lived a man, who sailed the seas..." She was learning it for an assembly at school. I couldn't get her to do that part again but she would do some of the chorus for a video:
As my favorite psychologist says the little things aren't little at all. I just saw that assembly too.
That's her, as a diver in a yellow submarine. They're all so cute:
Eating ice cream, daily life
I kept going on about a Thai tea flavored Dairy Queen blizzard that I think I mentioned here:
It's a temporary promotion so I keep eating those (with almonds in it, in that picture), and I just picked up a take-out version for the second time in the last two weeks:
Is that image familiar? It relates to the dry ice that came with the take-out version, which gives off "smoke" when you put it in water (really fog). We tested if that really burns your hand when you touch it but apparently it's not that dangerous a substance, not that cold. Testing unusual things out is normal for my kids; they're very curious. A month or so ago they were wondering what soap tasted like so we did a round of tasting it during the nightly shower. It's not delicious, not even a kids' version that smells like berries.
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in school uniforms |
Tasting the water that the dry ice bubbles in is not a good idea (that stuff is more an industrial product, not a food item), but apparently it had to be done. I think it still just tasted like water but Keo said maybe a little like Sprite or 7 Up too.
That's pretty much how it goes here; mostly mundane stuff, piano and tae kwan do lessons, grocery store errands, and the rest. Tea works as a hobby because it doesn't take up that much time, or at least blocks of free time when I'm at home. In addition to keeping me busy those two kids keep things fun for me.
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