I just wrote about our first four wheeled vehicle. A CNN news article today said there are now 800 million vehicles on the road and by mid century that could go to between 2 and 4 billion. The claim is that we are approaching gridlock in many parts of the world. It was written by someone from Ford Motor Company so I assume they meant four wheeled vehicles, because in this part of the world there are a whole lot more two wheeled vehicles.

This is not news to me, since we are just about to gridlock here in Nang Rong. At least half of the time I have been out in my four wheeled vehicle lately I have had to pull over and wait, maybe even back up a bit, or cause the other people to do the same. Yesterday I just had to stop in the middle of the street until people parked some ways out from the curb on both sides of the narrow street finally moved.

Nang Rong was built before there were motorcars, and Thailand has taken a great deal longer to acquire a significant number of cars than the US. Especially up here in Nang Rong. Well, we have them now. The streets are narrow, buildings built to within a few feet of them, leaving a narrow sidewalk which is usually loaded with shop goods so everyone walks in the street. View at corners is blocked by buildings so the average cornering speed, even off the main highway into Nang Rong, is about 2 miles an hour with your car coming within inches of the cars waiting at the light to go the other way.

Not the most narrow street in Nang Rong, certainly not the busiest, just the street in front of my house. My driveway is on the right just past the green stripped awning. One way traffic works here. It is a two way street, for motorbikes anyway.

Cars are relatively new here. Many even older people have just recently learned to drive them. They are not reckless or dangerous, you have to be young to be that, and most of the young people still don’t have that kind of money here. Their elders are very slow and careful. They may not yet have learned where the car is and so may park half a car’s width or more from the curb, which makes streets hard to navigate when the person on the other side parks that way also. Add traffic coming the other way and now it is impossible.

Some informal Thai rules of the road:
• Do not go the wrong way on a one way street unless it is for a short distance. Of course if you are a motorcycle one way does not apply.
• If motorcycles are parked at the curb you may park away from the curb outside of them.
• When you stop at one of the three lights in town leave space in front. If you don’t the motorbikes will go around you anyway, and those that don’t fit in front will get stuck beside you, making it that much harder for you to get going without knocking into them (narrow streets, remember?).
• Always use your turn signals when ready to turn. The motorbikes are going to pass you anyway, but you can influence on which side.
• Always watch out for motorbikes. Remember the “reckless and dangerous” young people I referred to above? Well guess what they drive.
• If you get a phone call while driving on the highway your natural Thai caution has you slow down to a few miles an hour – on a blind corner with possible high speed traffic just out of sight.
• When doing road maintenance on any road, even a major highway it’s OK to have an abrupt 6 inch change in level with no warning. Going down these is really not too bad, but going up them…
• Don’t EVER ride a motorbike fast at night (see above).
• If you need to do something really unusual or crazy, just turn on your flashers and everyone will understand.

Taken out of my driveway. He starts coming by at 7:30 AM. Do you suppose he bothers someone else even earlier?

This leads me to the next traffic problem: elections. Fortunately they only have them every four years. For a town of this size there are an unbelievable number of speaker trucks driving around town very slowly while making the most noise possible. They start on my street at about 7:30 AM every morning. The worst offender is candidate #3 (out of about 16). The announcer, with great excitement, yells his name several times in a row and then goes on to tell of his greatness in such an excited tone that it quickly leads to emotional overload and exhaustion. He comes by a number of times each day. Multiply that by 16 or more candidates and you begin to understand. Each candidate may have many trucks. They are all over and moving slow. At one point I saw six of them in a row, for different candidates, all with speakers going full. Whether a Thai could understand any of that I don’t know. I surely could not.

Six sound trucks, different candidates, all going full blast.

So, is it safe to drive here? I would say yes, it is overall. Certainly a lot safer than some other countries with which I am familiar, like India. if you try to keep to the daylight hours, and avoid holiday evenings when more people are drunk. I know more people here recently involved in accidents than I do in the US. The rate of severe injury and death from accidents is not so bad, because driving here is slower. Some things are safer. Riding a motorbike in town here is much safer than doing that the same in town in the US. The town is built close together, streets are narrow, you go so much slower, especially when there are lots of sound trucks. Actually, for motorcycle accidents, I know more people in the US…

It’s time for us to leave Nang Rong. There are already some hot days in late February this time, although there are number of cool ones as well. A few things have happened.

Regarding restaurants and chain stores, it appears the local KFC may make it (refer to previous blog entry). I do often see it empty, but on a hot day the air conditioning is a draw. I remember two years back when I first brought my wife Sue to Nang Rong. I think it was a hot day in March. I can’t remember what we were doing, but when lunch time rolled around she just had to go to an air conditioned restaurant. At that time there was only one choice. We ended up standing in a corner in Seven Eleven with a hot dog and a slurpee.

Anyway, Sue has hauled me over to KFC in Nang Rong three times now. They now have the complete KFC line of food. In addition, rumors are floating about that the large area of land being prepared on the highway seven kilometers west of Nang Rong is going to be a new Lotus Tesco, which is a large discount store with groceries.

The new highway 24 just went all four lane as far east as Nang Rong last year, and development will come more quickly along its route. This will be at the expense of the old east west route 50 km north of here which passes through the capital cities of Buriram and three adjacent provinces.

Times are changing, but it will take years for change to get into Nang Rong once you get off the highway. Land rights and existing buildings will keep the old layout. Roads are narrow and corners are sharp, with most turns made at 1 – 2 miles an hour. The growth will be east and west of town along the new four lane road.

We have a foundation board meeting this Monday, then we leave for Bangkok the next day. We have a few doctor appointments there (we are certified medical tourists) and then we’ll leave for Singapore. We’ll be back in Nang Rong by early October for sure.

The first picture was taken at night just as I left my landlord’s house. This elephant goes around Nang Rong in the evening with a reflector tied to his tail, stopping at the restaurants. Since the restaurants are open to the outside, the elephant just comes up close, but not close enough to grab anything off your table or tap you on the shoulder with his trunk. If it is dark outside you don’t notice him until he’s there. His handler sells a bag of sugar cane you can buy and feed back to him. My wife always goes for it.

The seat on the elephant suggests you could get a ride if you wanted. We’ve never checked into that. I’ve driven an elephant in the jungle, but driving one in the city is probably beyond my capabilities.

We have a volunteer family visiting for three weeks. The night after their first day it rained. Then there was a light drizzle all day for their second and third days. It is finally leaving and should be back to normal sunny “dry season” days soon.

Now I’m thinking you may not believe me after all I have said about continuous great weather here during “dry” or “cool” season. This is the first time in my three years here that I remember it being like this. If it does rain, which is rare, during this season, it usually rains hard for about ten minutes and that’s it, just like in rainy season.

We are just getting started on our first child home in Opportunity Village. In April the first of our two families, now in rental homes, will move into the new house. We are looking to add one or if possible two more families in rental homes this year. The second picture is not going to be the new home. It’s the temporary shelter, and perhaps home, for the workers building the house. It’s over by the main canal on the west side of the property.

The final thing to report is that I ran into another parade two days ago, on the street that crosses my street five houses down. The flatbed trucks you see coming held monks and nuns sitting in rows. Something to do with buddhism, of course, but other than that I don’t know. Now just about every street around me has had a parade in the last year except mine. Some weddings, a few ordinations (kids becoming a monk for awhile) and buddhist house warming celebrations, but no real parades.

You can protect your food by putting it in the refrigerator. If an ant does get past the seal it will die in the cold. You can use sealing plastic containers, but the seal better be perfect and a temperature change better not pop the lid, like when you take one out of the refrigerator, or closed it in the cool of night. Ziploc bags are unreliable. The ants seem to chew through them much of the time. Some product bags may work. The basic rule is, if you cannot open it yourself without tools, they ants may not be able to get into it either. It is hard to rely on even this rule, however.

The answer seemed to be to put everything into the refrigerator. That is really inconvenient. It’s not possible when Sue is here stocking up in Korat every two weeks. The ant invasion solutions on the internet involve chemicals, sealing everything adequately, being able to seal off your house better than I can here, and maybe an assumption that the ants are not quite so ready or numerous as they are here.

All I needed to do was ask a Thai. I bought six small bowls for the six legs on my cheap aluminum kitchen cabinet. The legs sit in the bowls which are filled with water. The fifty cent blue pipe is needed to fill the back center bowl. It should take more than a month for the water to evaporate, and we can move everything into the refrigerator when we leave for the U.S.

I tested it by leaving the knife out on the counter top after spreading jam on toast. It was there for 24 hours and I did see one ant. It was not eating jam. It must have been looking for a way back to the nest. I theorize it fell from the ceiling. Now if they could learn to do that, and then go to the cabinet bottom and fall to the floor when they want to get off, I could be in trouble. They’ll have to evolve more before they can do that.

So now I have a big cabinet I can store any kind of food in or on. I’ll try to keep the doors closed in case something larger wants to munch, but I have seen no signs of anything like that yet.

Something did happen last night. There is some kind of small beetle, dark brown and shaped like a ladybird beetle but a quarter or less the size, that is mating, breeding or otherwise celebrating some part of their life cycle. This part appears to be to find a light and fly around within a foot of it until you die. This is a picture of my front porch. I had the porch light on for movie night and forgot to turn it off until later. They look like coarse brown dirt. This is the second and probably last die off I have seen this year. The first time I had five or more times as many insects. I should have taken a picture of my porch then. It was quite impressive. I did not realize what the “dirt” was and just started sweeping it away. They sweep up easily.

Few came in last night because there was no inside light to draw them (movie night, remember?). Thai houses don’t seal that well, and the night of the first time I did not understand what was happening. My inside, as well as outside, lights were on and a few got in. I was reading directly under a light and five or six times a little beetle just fell onto me. It could be dead or still crawling a bit. They don’t bite and you can’t feel them except when they first fall and hit you. When I was cleaning up next morning I noticed they were only on the dining and coffee tables in the house, nowhere else. The two lights were directly over these tables.

So if you are eating your evening meal at an outdoor restaurant (about the only kind we have) in Nang Rong and start getting bombed by tiny beetles, just move to a table between two lights, and you should not have any problem.

Almost two weeks ago I noticed a new building starting just around the corner from me in Nang Rong. I know, I say everything is just around the corner. It usually is. I live close to city center, such as it is. My house is on the same street just beyond the houses your see rising in the background in these pictures.

The rebar runs up pretty high, so I’m guessing it will be a two story building like those around it. I want to see how it goes up, but from the start it appears to have a problem. In the first picture there is no rebar placed between any of the narrow columns, and no concrete poured between them in the second picture. Such walls, if present, would be called shear walls. They may be engineered or not, have enough rebar or not, but they would still be shear walls.

Shear walls prevent the columns simply bending over due to a side thrust from an earthquake. When this happens the concrete floors and roofs above “pan cake” down on whoever is below. It can get really bad if it is a school and in session. That happened not long ago in China.

You can read about shear wall basics here.

I see buildings built like this all the time in India. Only in one case of an under construction building (large Catholic home for street boys – Yay!) do I remember seeing steps taken to prevent pan caking. I talked to an Indian geologist about this and his answer was “We don’t have earthquakes in this city.” This was after he told me about an earthquake that killed 30,000 people years before about 800 miles south of where we were.

Earthquakes can happen anywhere, although they may be less likely in some places, such as Nang Rong. If one does happen what then? If this current building were built correctly, it could hold itself up in an earthquake, and maybe also help stabilize buildings around it.

You may have heard about how expensive it is to fix an existing building for earthquake resistance, but shear walls are very cheap to put into a new building. The builders of this Nang Rong building are going to fill some of the spaces between the pillars with brick anyway. To fill a few of these places with concrete and a bit of rebar instead would cost very little more.

This is important! Even if built badly, without an engineer, buildings with shear walls don’t fall down. They may crack or be damaged in an earthquake, especially if engineered badly or not at all, but they just don’t fall down. The people in them survive.

In any of the buildings we build in Opportunity Village, if there is concrete over your head, there will be shear walls, guaranteed. We’ll even go one step further and properly engineer them!

I was going to run the ring road at the foundation, which is almost exactly one km around before running back. After getting a third of the way I had to stop. Our contractor for the property fill and road building had to quit a few months ago for the rainy season, but he must have restarted while I was gone. There was new loose fill on at least a third of the ring in the back. I guess he’ll roll it out later. He fills and compacts the road in 20 cm layers, but the compaction is sufficient that when loose it’s about half a meter of big dirt clods.

The road engineer/surveyor came out to the property at noon and asked me to come out again. This time I had my camera with me. It seems a property line marker had been mistakenly set in the wrong place and had caused the road to be placed wrong in turn. Also in another place the road was too close to the small canal. Not really a problem at this stage. The main thing I watch for is that no mistakes are made that might squeeze our child home locations between the road outer edge and our property line. It won’t do for our children to walk out the back door into one of the canals.

The left picture is taken by the small canal, which is to the right behind a grassy rise. Rot is on the left and Khun Winai our engineer/surveyor on the right. Ho, the father of our first family, is in the middle. He has a jacket and mask on for motorcycle riding. I do find a jacket helps if I’m riding a long way in cool season. I’m not in the picture but had no need of a jacket. I think Thais can have a little different perception of the weather than someone from the U.S. might.

It was early afternoon and the weather was still great. It was just right for walking the entire area that I had avoided this morning. Anyway, we checked everything and we will get it all into the correct position.

It’s an ideal time to be here. There are days in Nang Rong when the clouds come and are really welcome. This is the “dry” season when the sun is really welcome, and fortunately out nearly all the time. “Dry” may convey the wrong image. With rivers and canals everywhere this is certainly no desert. There is plenty of water for everyone and everything. “Cool Season” is another term that is maybe less used by Thais but better describes it for my way of thinking. It’s still short sleeve weather except maybe in the early morning, if you’re not running.

With Sue in India doing teacher training and me in Nang Rong, I have to think about finding food more often than I would otherwise. I have already written about one Isaan basic food group, Som Tam. Today I walked down to Nong Biea for lunch. It is named after the owner’s young son and located by a red teardrop on our map.

It is run by a good friend, shown here with his wife who works alongside him. Previously it was a one minute walk from my house but he closed that to help care for his son who was in a bad accident more than a year ago. He has since reopened in a new location. It now takes five minutes. In the above picture it appears dark back in there. It’s not dark, it’s just out of the sun. The front is open to the outside, just like nearly every other restaurant and store in Nang Rong. He cooks out front, to the right in the picture.

I had the old stand by, kao pat gai, or chicken fried rice. I have him put in onions too. I can get something like it in the states and I’ve had it at different places in Bangkok, but I like it better here. If a new farang knows the Thai name of only one dish, this is probably it.

“Pat” means stir fried. Except for steamed rice, most hot things served in a restaurant, the meat and the veggies, have just been stir fried. The first time I see a microwave oven in a restaurant in Nang Rong, I’ll let you know.

Many of the restaurants in Nang Rong offer fried rice, but Nong Biea’s looks and tastes lighter. When Nong Biea was closed, I got kao pat gai at other restaurants. What made me stop eating it was getting a take out bag and putting it in the refrigerator for the next day. I took it out and looked through the transparent bag and thought “I’ve been eating this?” and hoped I had not been forgetting my cholesterol pills. It was easy to see the solidified white grease here and there. I heated it up in the microwave just to try it. It did not taste as good as the day before. I only ate the first bite.

After having sworn off, I tried it again a few weeks ago when working at the foundation office. We all ordered kao pat gai from Nong Biea to be brought in for lunch. It looked and tasted a bit lighter than I remembered, so a few days ago I did the “test” again. I got both a take out and an eat in order of kao pat gai. It was very good at the restaurant, and when I took it out of the refrigerator the next day it still looked good, without any more clumping up than already cooked rice is going to do. After microwaving it tasted pretty much the same as the day before.

Kao pat gai is normally not spicy at all. You can add the red peppers shown in the small dish if you wish. I usually do. At Nong Biea I also like gapow gai, a spicier dish with chicken and steamed rice in the rightmost picture. Pak boong, the green vegetable shown with it, is a very common vegetable and is maybe the Thai substitute for spinach.

Thailand is just starting to think about heart health. Many of the city hospitals are opening up heart centers and doctors here know more about heart disease than a few years ago. I suppose in a few years they will start thinking more about what they are eating (they still consume tons of MSG also). In the meantime, I would have already recommended Nong Biea for those of its selections I had previously tried, but now I can also say that they use vegetable oil for their stir frying, not the left over hog fat.

I have never noticed anywhere in this part of the world that has a noise ordinance. In Nang Rong many wats have big outdoor speakers and play music, sometimes western music, in the evening. This normally does not last very late, but may if there is a special festival. The Red Cross of Thailand and others hold the equivalent of a county fair at the field in front of the Nang Rong School. In fact there is one still going on right now, connected with the festival I just described in a previous post. Here again there are plenty of booths with sound systems. It can get pretty difficult to use your cell phone outside.

Weddings (seen above), ordinations (nearly every boy in Thailand is ordained as a monk for at least a week or two), and other occasions have a speaker system or two somewhere, with the Thais out in the streets dancing to it. I attended the celebration for the new Nang Rong nigh amphoe (equivalent of our county commissioner) and did he use the P.A. system for a speech? Not that I remember, but he did sing. He was good, but I’ve heard that the previous holder of that office was really great. The previous governor has a good singing voice as well.

Right now several people, including our contractor for our foundation land fill, are running for mayor. For this you see billboard trucks with big speakers all around town. For other things there are cars with speakers tucked in the trunk (as seen in the day before yesterday’s parade), motorcycle speaker platforms, you name it.

I asked various local people what they think about all this sound and the consensus is: They like it. Thai people like to have fun, and music and other sounds are part of that.

From my American point of view, I don’t think it is carried too far. It is fun, and the atmosphere is perhaps an upgrade from a typical, somewhat dull, American small town. More like our movies (the happy ones) show American small towns forty to sixty years ago.

There is still a lot of quiet time, unlike Bangkok, where, except for your hotel room, it is continually noisy with traffic outside and music/advertisements inside. I started trying to learn Thai in Bangkok and found it impossible, since it was always too noisy for me to hear anyone well enough to distinguish unfamiliar language sounds.

Where do all these speakers and sound systems come from? Less that a two minute walk from my house is the largest speaker store I have seen just about anywhere. I couldn’t get the whole store front into the picture, it’s too long. He sells just about everything related to P.A. systems and professional sound. What I did not find there were home theater/hi fi type systems. There are a few, considerably smaller stores that sell smaller home systems here, but they don’t amount to much. I thought this had to be the largest store if its type in the area, but no, the owner said there is a larger one sixty kilometers away in Buriram city.

How are Thais different from Americans? Well, if we follow the money, Thais appear to spend much more for public sound than for anything they put in their homes. I think we Americans are the other way with our big home theater surround sound systems. Who enjoys it more? Thais dance in the streets. Can we match that?

I woke up a bit late yesterday to the sound of a marching band outside. They have a lot of celebrations in Nang Rong. I probably miss most of them since I am not always here. Anyway, I got out quickly and there they were a block away. I’m still not exactly sure what is was all about. The Banners across the street say “Father God of Nang Rong”. Apparently it was Chinese Thai specific celebration connected with the coming Chinese new year that emphasizes honoring of God (I’m not sure which one) and ancestors.

The parade had a short route and the band was standing more than marching. There were also people collecting money at the various shops along the way. This is a Chinese festival, so there were plenty of firecrackers going off in the street. Many shopkeepers had a table out front with offerings. The offerings seemed to follow a pattern with tea foremost, then water, oranges and incense in the back.

I’m told that this particular celebration is particular to Chinese Thais, not Chinese in general, and varies greatly from town to town in Thailand. I think the Chinese temple around the corner from my house toward the main road (yellow teardrop on our map)  is involved with it, but am not sure.

I would like to know more, but few Thais in Nang Rong speak English, and most of those cannot go very deep. Unfortunately, I can’t go very deep with my Thai either, so can only find out the basics about these things. Many of the things I see going on about me will have to retain a certain amount of mystery.