I picked up my visa in the afternoon as soon as they started handing them out to all the people that applied the morning yesterday and as soon as I got it I dashed for the border taking a series of local buses in hopes that, unlike last time, I could get through before dark. I made it to the border crossing at dusk and when it was almost my turn to get checked out and stamped in a guy from Singapore in front of me who arrived with me on the same bus told me to put 1 MYR in my passport with my arrival card to speed things up. I told him I would not be doing that and was thinking not only would I not give them the equivalent of a U.S. quarter for simply doing their job and be complicit in corruption I wouldn’t even give them a penny, not even a really dirty one I was just looking to get rid of. Continue reading
Durian Liars
Before you try buying a Mao Shan Wang durian just know that many durian sellers have no qualms about lying to your face and ripping you off so be sure to do your research before throwing down big money on a durian they tell you is tree ripened and freshly fallen Mao Shan Wang but is really just some imported and extremely overpriced Chanee that was cut down partially ripe from a tree in Thailand a week ago. If you’re interested in not being ripped off by durian sellers check out this article.
That Guy Was Crazy
Today as I was skateboarding the right way down a one-way road with no traffic I had a guy on a motorcycle drive up from behind in the lane next to me, look directly at me, and pretend to shoot me three times with his finger/hand. I have no idea what that was all about as I’m certain I’ve never met him or did anything in the last 24 hours I’ve been in Malaysia that could have possibly made him want to pretend to shoot me the way he did, which was not in a fun playful way. I got off my skateboard to put some distance between us and to think about what just happened and as I did there was a middle aged Singaporean couple walking towards me on the other side of the street that had seen what happened and were also surprised and the women said “That guy was crazy.”.
Getting Attacked For Helping People
I went to the shuttle bus stop to buy a ticket to the grocery store. I could’ve saved a dollar or two by getting into the back of an old truck with a bench running along each side of its cab, aka “local bus” but if I was going to be out on the road during this dangerous holiday I’d rather be in a big relatively safe bus. However I was told the 3pm bus wasn’t coming and since I didn’t want to wait for the next one I told the ticket lady no thanks and was going to head to the local bus stop. Continue reading
Water and Alcohol = Dangerous Roads
As if the roads in Thailand weren’t already dangerous enough today is the second day of Songkran (Thai New Year) a holiday where many people throw water from the side of the road and out of the back of trucks at people driving or walking by and where drunk drivers aren’t hard to find. I try to stay off the road this time of year as the death toll adds up. Right now for the first 3 days of this deadly week it’s at 181 deaths which is 50% higher than last year along with 1,771 injuries. In fact just a few hours ago I saw a truck that crashed off the side of the road with people standing around it.
According to the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute Thailand has the second most dangerous roads in the world with 44 deaths per 100,000 and the most dangerous is Namibia with 45. China is 22, the global average is 18, the U.S. is 14, and countries like Canada, France, and Germany are 8, 7, and 6 respectively. Which means you’re over 6 times likely to die on the roads in Thailand than you are in France or Germany. So if you’re in Thailand, particularly during Songkran, please be careful and wherever you are please, please, please don’t drink and drive.
Yellow Hands White Eyes
Yellow hands are nothing to worry about provided you have white eyes. If you do odds are your yellow hands, and feet, are a result of consistently consuming large amounts of beta carotene, probably from carrots, but in my case from papayas. This is known as carotenosis and is more common among fair skinned vegetarians and others who eat large amounts of fruits and vegetables. However you should be worried if in addition to yellowish skin your eyes also have a yellowish tinge to them as this is known as jaundice and is a sign of liver problems.
Nicotine Addicts
Even if you really couldn’t care less about yourself, your neighbor one floor above you, or that guy sitting behind you on the boat please realize that when you purchase tobacco you are funding ad campaigns designed to get children and young adults hooked on this terrible drug. Children like the many 14 year old girls and boys I’ve lectured on the sides of streets and backs of alleys over the years. I sincerely urge you, not for you, not for me, and not for the many other people who are really tired of your second hand smoke, but for all the young adults, children, and unborn babies you are harming to please stop smoking and supporting the tobacco industry.
Toy Guns
Dear Parents, Grandparents, and anyone else who buys toys for kids can we please stop it with the toy guns because it’s repugnant to give a child a toy gun so they can go around pretending to shoot people. I’m not talking about colorful squirt guns but the kinds of lookalikes that could get you shot in the States. I’m sure you can find a more constructive toy for a child to play with and if not give them a few sticks and rocks as these are much better than a toy gun which is one of the worst toys you could give a child.
Secular Society
Religions are a vague and self-contradicting mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly which are up for interpretation by people who seek to exploit the faithful and by people that can’t let go of the psychological crutch that religion is for them. While seeking to positively influence the faithful we must strive to embody the human dignity and high moral standards that can be and often are associated with secular lifestyles and to continually improve the human rights and high standards of living that can be and often are enjoyed by people living in secular societies.
We should also candid because regardless of which version of a particular religion a person claims to be practice if they practice it in a way that violates basic morality and fundamental human rights they must be called out and society must seek to outlaw such practices. There’s no validity in any argument which claims that if you aren’t “one of them” you don’t have the right to criticize their culture because as humans we not only have the right but the responsibility to criticize other humans for inhumane and oppressive practices which lower the moral standing of our species.
Child Beekeepers
Although I’m really not a fan of religion I respect the right of anyone to believe in whatever hocus-pocus they please. However I don’t respect or even accept when parents, teachers, and/or other insecure and misguided adults try to impose this hocus-pocus on children by threatening them with beatings and/or eternal suffering in a place they call “hell”. Forcing toddlers to wear a hijab in the 38C (100F) tropical heat is bad however I think forcing children as young as 10 to wear a niqab is even worse.
As other children were swimming/playing at the beach it was sad to see two poor girls have to drink their bottles of soda and eat their fried chicken by strategically placing it under and up their beekeeper suits. Not only could they not go swimming they weren’t even allowed to eat their food the way humans have for hundreds of thousands of years and that is NOT from underneath a black sheet with eye holes. Moreover the two older women they were with weren’t even wearing niqabs just hijabs which still make me cringe but at least they allow a person to eat and drink and have a face in society.
I’ve seen local women in beekeeper suits before and as sad as it is I’ve never said anything however I can’t be quiet if I see skinny little 12 year old girls forced to wear them so I politely I told the two adults that it was pitiful and that kids should be allowed to be kids and when they do grow up to decide for themselves whether or not they want to go through life dressed like that. They didn’t appear angry about me calling them out but thought it was amusing that I actually stopped my beach run to do so. Not that I could see their reactions or they’d have the courage speak but I’m guessing the two girls agreed with my comments.
Broken Back
I went to the beach today and while I was there I saw a middle aged man carrying his wife’s limp body out of the water. She wasn’t dead but she had at some point in her life become paralyzed. I thought I’d mention this so you could also remember just how great it is to be able to move your legs because we sometimes forget and take things like the ability to walk for granted. So if your legs still work make the most of them and instead of burning fossil fuels every time you need to go somewhere consider burning some plant derived calories.
Papaya: Where Do You Get Your Calcium?
I had a nice tree ripened papaya for breakfast today which is great for your teeth particularly if you have eaten something too acidic the day before. It weighed 2700g and after I cut it in half lengthwise and scraped it clean with my papaya shovel it yielded around 2200g of pulp. Papaya shovels aka stainless steel Chinese spoons are the perfect tool for eating papaya, melons, or any other fruit that’s soft enough to be scooped out of it’s peel and I highly recommend them.
Today’s papaya provided around 880 calories which is less than half of what I’d need to eat on an inactive day like today however it provided more than half of the calcium I’ll need for the day. I’m not sure exactly how much calcium I need, I’ve never tested low for it in any of my blood tests, but I’m pretty sure it’s not too much more than 530mg especially when that 530mg comes from such an easily digested and absorbed source.
P.S. Months later I made another trip to the morning market in search of breakfast and as usual I walked through to see what was available in the front, center, and back before I decided on what to eat. Early in I spotted two nice papayas which were not one of the commonly available cultivars so I made a mental note and continued on. After confirming there wasn’t anything better up ahead I went back to buy the papayas only to find that the seller had covered up his goods and left at lightening speed. I knew those papayas were still under that tarp so I asked the guy in the next stall to sell them to me and tell his friend the next day.
As he opened the tarp I saw that the papayas were gone, bummer. However as I let my head down in disappointment I noticed a garbage basket and at the top of the heap of decaying plant matter and random market garbage were the two papayas, hooooooo! So I took them both and got a free breakfast. I guess the guy figured they were already ripe and since most Thai people aren’t into ripe fruit and prefer what are often sweeter yet less tasty fruit cultivars over the often less sweet but more fragrant and tasty heirloom, nameless, and unidentifiable varieties he figured they weren’t worth holding onto and having take up prime table space.
Plantains: Why Are You Cooking Them?
Once while transporting some plantains a middle-aged lady that I often bought fruit from thought it was crazy that I was going to eat them raw. So I asked her “You’ve lived here your entire life and have been around these things for many years yet you’ve never thought to try and eat one of them ripe and raw? Nope, not once! I am writing this for people like her and people who only just heard about plantains in order to say: Yes you can eat plantains raw and they’re quite good so ignore those who say things like a plantain needs to be “cooked before serving as it is unsuitable raw”… not surprisingly this was said by a company that sells processed plantain chips, go figure.
While writing this post I remembered an email I sent to the Chiquita Banana Company regarding the information on their plantain website a few years ago so I just went to it to see if it had been updated. It hasn’t been so one of the main companies importing these bananas into the U.S. is still unaware that plantains can, and I would argue should be, eaten raw. Instead they tell people to cook their bananas and provide recipes so people can eat them with bacon, cheese, slave caught shrimp, and factory farmed chicken. I grabbed the following screen shot from their website which out of all the plantain recipes and information does not say anywhere that plantains can be eaten raw, in fact it specifically says ” Eaten cooked (not raw)”.
I haven’t had any plantains in a long time as they’re hard to come by in my area however I was fortunate enough to encounter a bunch that was in my opinion harvested way too early considering it was going to be consumed locally and didn’t need to be shipped across an ocean. However after sitting in my room for a week a few ripened to the point I could start eating them. Today is day 14 and the five that remain are fully ripe. Note that when I bought this bunch of unripe bananas I did not cut them from the stem and instead let them drain the once thick and heavy green stem like Cell drained Piccolos arm. The result is a shriveled stem and some really good bananas despite having been harvested a bit too early. Here are some photos I’ve taken over the past two weeks.
Toilet Training
It’s bad when people perpetuate customs without independently evaluating them and consciously deciding whether or not they’re worth perpetuating but it’s even worse when people abandon a good custom that they’ve always had only to replace it with something worse. No I’m not talking about how in many parts of East Asia the handshake has become a common greeting, I’m talking about toilets. In East Asia not too long ago most toilets were squat-toilets as opposed to sit-toilets however nowadays in many East Asian shopping centers you may have a hard time finding a squat-toilet because in many public places they’ve been replaced by sit-toilets which are not only unsanitary, particularly in public places, they’re also unhealthy as a sitting position is not the position humans have evolved to go #2 in.
However many locals and the occasional fruit loving foreigner are fighting back by refusing to sit. By politely lifting up the dirty toilet seat with our foot, hoping up on to the toilet to do our business, and leaving our footprints behind as evidence of our peaceful protest we are letting shopping centers know that we want squat-toilets. As for people who can’t squat we already have a solution for that, it’s called the handicapped toilet and it even comes complete with bars to help users get on and off of it. If shopping centers feel that most people would prefer to sit on a dirty toilet seat rather than squat they’re welcome to have half the toilets sitters and the other half squatters. However if they eliminate all of the squatters and think that signs like these will dissuade people from hopping on to the toilet they are wrong.
It’s Not an Apple!
Sugar apple, custard apple, water apple, star apple, velvet apple… None of these fruits taste like or resemble an apple so lets stop calling them apples. There’s no need to be so primitive in our use of language that we must always combine two familiar words to name something as some things are worthy of their own names. To me these apple-ending names are as ridiculous as fuzzy apple for peaches and baby apple for cherries so here are some better names for English speakers to use and links to photos:
sugar apple = sweetsop (there’s also a soursop)
custard apple = cherimoya (related to the above two along with atemoya and a rollinia)
water apple, wax apple, rose apple, java apple = bellfruit (there are many different types and closely related fruits)
star apple = cainito (related to sapodilla, canistel, and abiu)
velvet apple = mabolo (related to persimmon and black sapote aka chocolate pudding fruit)
I’ve been fortunate enough to have tried them all however there are even more, many more, delicious and nutritious fruits that I haven’t tried and I hope they don’t go extinct due to humanities love of meat, palm oil, and burning fossil fuels all of which are responsible for the deforestation and climate change that is killing off much of the biodiversity on this planet.
Pushed to the Edge (spoiler alert)
If you haven’t watched Pushed to the Edge I strongly recommend you do before reading this. It’s available on YouTube and the Channel 4 website. Continue reading
Sunbathing in the Tropics?
Why do people repeatedly lather themselves up in toxic sunscreen that’s going to be absorbed through their skin and into their body to protect them from the intense tropical sun only to lay directly under the sun until their skin turns a brownish red and is damaged to the point it begins to age prematurely only to go out and buy toxic “anti-aging” skin creams?
I can see a person not putting any sunscreen on and laying naked or half naked in the sun if they lived in a place where the sun was weak and it was difficult to get enough however tourists from such areas please note that in the tropics you don’t have to try to get all the sun your body could possibly need especially if you don’t cover your skin with toxic sunscreen.
I try to stay out of the sun and carry an umbrella with me when I can’t because I’m not adapted to the tropical sun like the locals and don’t want my skin to age prematurely. However even with such caution and even though I consume virtually no Vitamin D in my diet when I checked my 25-Hydroxy Vitamin D level in 2015 it was at 88.88ng/ml which means I probably get too much sun.
When visiting the tropics be careful to limit your sun exposure. I don’t recommend sunscreen but I do recommend an umbrella and some long sleeves and a wide brimmed hat when you’re unable to carry an umbrella along with some common sense, e.g., try not to be exposed to the sun when it’s at full tropical fry you power and arrange your outdoor activities for morning and late afternoon so you don’t get burned.
Cliff Jumping
So you want to try jumping off a cliff or some other high place into water? I don’t recommend it unless you’ve confirmed the water depth while taking into account how it can vary with the tides, thoroughly checked for any underwater obstacles such as rocks, have a person nearby that is willing and able to assist you if necessary, and only if the jump height is less than 8 meters (26 feet) because anything higher than that is quite dangerous. In fact an uncontrolled fall from even that modest height could leave you unconscious and seriously injured. Many people who haven’t cliff jumped, including myself until fairly recently, do not understand the force at which you impact the water and how important it is to be in the proper vertical, arms in, legs together, toes pointed, eyes squeezed shut position for entry. Obviously a belly or back smacker is to be avoided but even a butt first landing could be devastating provided it’s from a good height.
Fruit Warning For Thailand Tourists
In Thailand many of the locals prefer to eat unripe fruit. For instance mangoes are often eaten green, hard, and tooth meltingly sour. I do cringe a little when I see locals eating unripe mangoes, jackfruit, bananas, santols, and pieces of durian that look more like raw potato than durian but what really gets me is when tourists come to Thailand and try these fruits for the first and perhaps last time but are given unripe fruit not worth eating.
If you try durian in Thailand for the first time you’ll probably buy a small plastic wrapped pack of it rather than a whole fruit so here are three tips for selecting some durian that’s worth trying. I don’t endorse buying anything on or in foam packing so if possible try and buy durian that’s packed on paper but know you probably won’t find any so you should just bring your own reusable food container and have the seller open a fresh ripe one and sell you some of that or you could just buy a whole durian which comes packaged in a biodegradable spiked shell.
1.) Color: The color of durian flesh ranges from white to red however odds are the type of durian you’ll encounter in Thailand is MonThong. When it comes to this cultivar of durian generally speaking the yellower the better however note that many cultivars of durian are supposed to be white or close to it.
2.) Softness: Don’t squeeze ripe fruits! I can’t believe how many tourists I’ve seen squeezing ripe fruit or poking dents into it and then walking away without buying it. However you can very slightly press on the plastic wrap covering the durian with your finger tip just enough to know whether or not it’s soft.
3.) Smell: If all that stands between you and a piece of fresh ripe durian is a thin layer of plastic it should give off a strong smell and make you understand why durian is banned from most hotels and public transportation. If you’re only getting a slight smell or no smell it’s probably unripe durian which isn’t worth trying.
In summary if you visit Thailand and would like to try some durian make sure it passes the three checks above and if you see some that looks like the unripe, overpriced, inedibly bad stuff below it’s best to pass and wait for a better chance to try this must try fruit. Also feel free to let the fruit seller know that you’d like to buy some durian provided it was soft and ripe so they understand that unlike many of the locals most people prefer ripe, sweet, fragrant, and in the case of durian, very soft fruit.
If you want to see what durian is supposed to look like check out this post.
P.S. Rambutans should be red, not green, when you eat them. There are yellow rambutans but you’re unlikely to come across those in Thailand. However you will see people selling unripe green ones which I don’t recommend.
Lunar, Solar, and Lunisolar Calendars
Depending on which calendar a society uses there are many different New Year’s and in some places more than one is celebrated. Calendars are generally one of three types: lunar, solar, or lunisolar. A lunar calendar is based on the revolution of the moon around the earth, a solar calendar is based on the revolution of the earth around the sun, and a lunisolar calendar is based on the moon’s revolution around the earth but includes a thirteenth month, aka leap month, every two or three years to keep it in sync with the earth’s revolution around the sun.
In lunisolar calendars like the Chinese calendar a leap month is periodically added so the months correspond with the seasons. It takes the moon around 29.5 days to revolve around the earth which means 12 lunar months is around 354 days and since it takes the earth around 365 days to revolve around the sun the months and seasons would drift apart around 11 days each year without this leap month. The New Year’s that takes place on January 1st is according to the Gregorian or Western calendar which is a solar calendar and the New Year’s that takes place today and every year on the new moon between late January and late February is according to the Chinese calendar.
Happy New Year! 新年快樂！
Sheen = new 新
Nee-en = year 年
Kwai Luh = happy 快樂
Sheen Nee-en Kwai Luh! Try it if you encounter a Chinese speaking person this week because unlike the Western New Year Chinese New Year, aka Spring Festival, is a multi-day mega holiday that doesn’t officially conclude until the 15th day which marks the first full moon of the new year and is celebrated as Lantern Festival.