The Dangerous Animals Club

September 8th

Have I mentioned how much I love zoos?  Mika told me about a nice zoo just north of Pattaya that she had visited with her family.  So the last time Tim headed off to India, we made plans to go.  In addition to seeing the animals, I was excited by the fact that I would get to drive.  Driving a golf cart is better than nothing!  This zoo is so spread out that they have golf carts available for visitors to rent.  Mika doesn't drive, so I happily agreed to do the driving, with Mika and Momo as my passengers.

The place is the Khao Kheow Open Zoo.  Located at the base of Khao Kheow Mountain, it has grown over the years to 2000 acres, making it the largest zoo area in the world.  The surroundings are lush, green hills with lots of trees, a beautiful place to spend the day.  We said goodbye to Mick and bought our tickets, then walked over to the golf cart rental.  The carts were a bit pricey (it came out to about ten dollars per hour), but definitely worth it.

Thank-you for the pictures, Mika!

I was glad Mika had been before, because the signage wasn't great, but we did find our way to the entrance.  Our first stop was to see the deer, who were not in an enclosure of any kind, but just hanging out in their little area.  Mika bought some greens for feeding, and the three of us enjoyed communing with our four-legged cousins.  I was holding the bunch of greens in one arm, like a bouquet, and felt the tugging of a deer who decided not to wait for a hand out.  They clearly know how this works, and were quite comfortable accepting food from our outstretched hands.

Back on board, we drove next to the Old World primates, seeing some species of monkey I'd never seen in any other zoo.  Some were tiny, with cute little hands and faces, others were the monkey-equivalent of a bulldog - very stocky.

Next up was the giraffe exhibit.  The giraffe enclosure brought visitors to nearly eye level with the giraffes, the closest I had ever been.  They are beautiful, magnificent creatures.  Food booths at nearly every stop provided animal food for purchase.  As Mika was buying food to feed the giraffes, a huge class of school children was released onto the scene, and quickly swallowed up poor Momo's chances to get up close with the giraffes.  We did manage some feeding, and the giraffes were skilled at wrapping their long, long tongues around the plants.  I was impressed at how composed they were with so many busy children in front of them.

The lion enclosure was just across from the giraffes, and I remarked to Mika how white the lion looked.  "Yes," she smiled, "because they are white lions."  Doh.  This particular lion was so perfectly majestic that it hardly looked real.  I would have thought it was fake if I hadn't seen it moving around with my own eyes.  Incredibly beautiful.  No feeding at this stop!

After the lions, we managed to put some distance between us and the hordes of school children, feeding some of our leftovers to the ostriches who lingered near the fence of their enclosure.  The flamingos across the way were such a lovely, gentle shade of pink - they seem quite elegant in their pink finery.

Just around the bend was the most memorable feeding experience with the rhinos.  Firstly, I'd never, ever been so close to these less-than-attractive behemoths.  And to actually feed them was an experience I won't soon forget.  Their mouths and noses are yucky, slimy orifices, and when they see food coming they open their slimy pinkish-gray mouths and hold them open for visitors to put the food in.  No teeth were visible, and it reminded me of something from a sci-fi movie.  Momo was adorably unafraid and said the rhinos were her friends.  The juxtaposition of ugly and adorable was amusing, to say the least!

We stopped at a vendor for some ice cream.  I got a frozen ice tea, and Momo was curious about it, asking in perfect English, "Is it yummy?"  I let her have a taste, but I don't think she was too impressed.

Next stop was the elephants, who were equally eager to accept donations from the visitors.  Only one elephant was big enough to reach his trunk all the way to Momo's little hand, and he was happy to take advantage.  We adults could lean over the rail to give equal time to the smaller elephants.  As enjoyable as it was to feed these creatures, one has to wonder about the safety of the animals. Anyone with ill intentions could easily feed them something that could make them sick.  Another example of Thailands lax regulations in stark contrast to the over-regulated United States.

We saw pygmy hippos, some very noisy sea otters that sounded like squeaky toys, some more monkeys, and a magnificent water buffalo with a shiny, leathery black coat and a prehistoric ridged backbone.  We even saw several macaque monkeys roaming freely along the roads.  I was amused by the inclusion of raccoon in one exhibit; you can see these on the deck of our house in Michigan!

The orangutan exhibit was up a steep hill, accessible only on foot.  At the top of the hill was a large, open enclosure behind a barrier and a moat, with several orangutans hanging out.  When we walked up, the worker there stood and said something toward the top of the tree next to where we were standing, on the visitors side of the barrier.  A young orangutan casually made its way down from the branches of the tree and sat directly in front of us!  This orangutan will pose for a picture with visitors for a small fee, but I refrained.  Another couple was feeding bananas to the orangutans, and it was amazing to watch the interaction.  I understand human interaction with wild animals is no longer PC, but it was fascinating.  The orangutan would hold out his paw for a banana, eat the insides, and hand back a nearly intact peel.  What skill!

On the other side of the same hill was the chimpanzee exhibit.  The chimps were less active, but it was interesting to watch one using a stick as a tool to scratch various body parts.  A huge lizard lurked at one end of the exhibit, but the chimps didn't pay it any mind.

Our last stop was the tiger exhibit.  Many of the tigers were gone from their cages, participating in a show in the pavilion.  The tiger enclosure was pretty small, relative to most of the other enclosures.  The tigers that were present paced back and forth restlessly.  Good time to make our exit.

We unhappily returned the golf cart, and Mika bought us copies of the picture they took of us at the outset.  This time we did find our way to J Park, a Japanese-themed mall about half way between the zoo and Pattaya.  We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant, stopped in the Japanese market so Mika could pick up a few things, and made our way back home, my zoo hunger satisfied for a little while.

When I arrived home, I had a man in my cupboard and a refrigerator in my living room...

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Tim's trips are usually Sunday to Friday, or something similar.  But this time he was gone over the weekend.  Weekends are not so fun when he's away - I was missing our backgammon and Chinese Checkers games on the deck.  So I took a walk down the road and stopped into a little nail salon to have my nails done.  This was probably the third or fourth manicure of my entire life.  This will not surprise most of you!  I felt uncomfortably spoiled, with one manicurist on each hand.  This was definitely a low-tech operation; they plugged in a little mini-fan to dry the nails, and sat holding the fan over my hands.

Then I stopped for a foot massage at Savanna - this is a chain with locations all over the city.  Every location is the same - women out front, eating, looking at their cell phones, gossiping, killing time until a customer approaches.  For under fifteen dollars I got an hour-and-twenty-minute foot scrub, foot massage and shoulder rub.  This is also something I have only rarely done.  Not a big fan of having a strangers' hands on me, I guess.

The scrub seemed to last a long time, and not just the feet, but the entire leg up to the knee.  My skin felt like it was being rubbed raw (using sea salt?), and the woman showed me her raw hands when she was done.  Next came the foot massage, which was great until she started digging a wooden stick into the tips of my toes - ouch!  I guess this is supposed to hit the pressure points.

I attempted some conversation in Thai with the woman as she was scrubbing away.  She asked me something I didn't understand.  But after working it out in my head for a couple of minutes, I realized she was asking how long I'd been in Thailand, and gave her my very delayed answer.  She, like many, told me I spoke good Thai; they are all being quite generous and polite.

While I was in my chair in the corner, a family came in and sat in the next set of chairs over.  The adults and children all got massages.  The children sat playing on their game consoles while they were worked on - weird to me.  Wonder if they even noticed the massage?  And do children really need massages?  At around the same time, a man came in, I assumed, for a full-body massage and was led to an area behind a curtain just steps away from where I was.  After a few minutes, he was snoring loudly.  How would he know whether he actually got the massage if he slept through it?  Two more men came in and sat in the two chairs facing mine.  They looked like twins, and seemed to relax quickly with their eyes closed.  It was getting quite crowded, not the most relaxing atmosphere for a massage by that point.  But it made for some good people-watching.  The shoulder rub was kind of an afterthought, where I was asked to sit on the foot stool facing the other way.  Couldn't have lasted more than five minutes.

On the walk home I got some shots of some of the stray dogs that are a part of every corner of the city.  They are pretty mellow for the most part.  I think they are fairly well fed by people working nearby; food vendors and such.

Not a stray, I know

Monday, August 17th, a bomb exploded in Bangkok.  It was strange how I learned about it - my brother who lives in Colorado emailed and said he hoped we weren't near the blast.  He knew about it before I did.  I had not been to the shrine where the explosion occurred, but we had stayed at a hotel just two blocks from the site.  Chulalongkorn University is quite close as well.  I imagine the students were unnerved by the situation.  Thai news is not very discreet about showing things on TV, but thankfully they kept the gruesome images to a minimum.  I wished I could understand more of what was being said.  Very troubling and scary, not knowing the motive or the perpetrators.  It was clear that many people were killed, most of them Asian tourists.

Tim was due back from India the next morning, and I was a bit concerned that security would be much more difficult as a reaction to the bombing.  But our driver sat right at the door as he usually does, and Tim said nothing seemed different coming through security.

In the days to come, they would have countless news updates that would air simultaneously on about twenty different TV channels.  They took the unusual step of having English and Chinese translators on these broadcasts.  ( English closed captioning is nearly non-existent, with the exception of the Korean channel).  These broadcasts always end with a screen shot that says, "National Council for Peace and Order."  Sounds a bit Orwellian, doesn't it?

Chinese translator on the left, English on the right

“War is peace. 
Freedom is slavery. 
Ignorance is strength.” 
― George Orwell, 1984

Cut From a Different Cloth

My friend, Mika, has been enjoying the availability of inexpensive tailoring in Pattaya.  She found a Thai couple who will make a copy of any clothing you bring them for a very reasonable price.  So she has been cruising the fabric shops in the area of late.

One day she and I went to the Jim Thompson fabric store here in Pattaya.  Jim Thompson was an American who greatly influenced theThai silk trade in the 1950s and 1960s.  He was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in Delaware.  He studied architecture in college, and designed some homes and a band shell in Rehoboth Beach.  He later joined the military, and was recruited as an operative for the OSS.  He was involved with the Free Thai movement, to help liberate Thailand from the occupying Japanese army after WWII.  In 1948, he co-founded the Thai Silk Company Ltd.  He is somewhat of a hero figure in Thailand, having helped countless fabric-makers to sell their wares.  The Jim Thompson house is a popular tourist attraction in Bangkok.  He designed it using parts of old "up-country" houses, bringing them by boat and reassembling them.  He used his creation to showcase his vast art and antiques collection.  He mysteriously disappeared in 1967.

The fabric store here in Pattaya has lots of high quality fabrics, many for furniture upholstery, and many with southeast Asian motifs.  We each bought a bit of fabric to have aprons made.  While the fabric was a bit costly, the tailors charged less than three dollars to make the apron.  It will be a nice souvenir of our time in Thailand.

I also heard about the great fabric shops in Chonburi, a town about forty minutes north of us.  On a day when Tim was in India, Mika and I took a little road trip to look at fabric there.  I knew Mick's wife had that day off, so I asked him if she might want to ride along with us, and she did.  It took all of us to navigate our way to the fabric market where Mick dropped Mika and me.  It was a hot, humid day, more so in Chonburi, I think because it is further away from the gulf.  Storefront after storefront overflowed with bolts of colorful fabric, with narrow aisles to navigate between them.

Chonburi is much less international than Pattaya, so shop owners were less fluent in English, but we managed to communicate what we needed.  Our Thai language classes were helpful in that regard.  It was an added challenge for me to shop for fabric in meters rather than yards.  But I did a little homework beforehand and had a pretty good idea how much I might need.  I was looking for some fabric to make capris, and told the salesperson I wanted a heavy cotton with a bit of stretch.  She showed me some fabric and said what I thought was "Spanish."  Was this fabric imported from Spain?  I heard it a few more times, finally realizing that they were saying the word "spandex."  I found a nice brown/green color and bought two meters.

Mika was shopping for fabric to have some shirts made for her mother.  She found some nice patterns and hoped it would be what her mother wanted.  The market was a mini version of the Jatujak market in Bangkok, with row after row of tiny shops under a common roof.  We enjoyed seeing not only the fabrics, but the many other wares for sale, including some interesting sea food and fresh produce.  We saw some beautiful blue crabs and many items I could not identify.  It was enjoyable seeing how the locals shop in an area that doesn't cater to tourists.  Unfortunately I didn't remember to take any pictures.

When I called Mick to say we were done, he said something about "car park" and "police" and "temple," and asked if we could walk a little bit.  I interpreted this to mean the police directed him to park in the temple parking lot and we should walk over that way.  (There was a large temple near where we were let off, and he said we should meet back there.)  We wandered to where we thought he might be, but couldn't find him.  We walked in the opposite direction, as Mika said she saw another parking area.  No luck that way, either.  We were headed back to the first area, when Mick's wife came out of a shop and called to us.  She led us back to the car, where we discovered that a boot had been placed on the tire.  Mick was not at the car, but he appeared shortly on the back of a motorcycle taxi, soon followed by a policeman.  I guess he had to go pay a fine to get the boot removed;  apparently he was parked in a no-parking zone.  Pretty harsh - he was not a happy camper.

We were soon on our way, and were hoping to stop for lunch at a place Mika wanted to show me, called J-Park.  This area has a large Japanese population and many of the shops cater to them.  The "J" stands for Japanese.  Mika's family likes to come here for groceries and such.  However, with a grumpy driver and fuzzy directions, we eventually decided to give up the search and head back to Pattaya for lunch.  We stopped at Tree Tales near our condo, but managed to stop Mick before he drove away when we discovered that they were closed on Mondays.  We went up the street to Coffee Club instead, and had a quick lunch before heading home.

Mika had purchased some pineapple chunks from a street vendor when we were in Chonburi.  I admired her willingness to "go local."  Unfortunately it caused a pretty severe stomach reaction later in the day.  I am always leery of buying food from the street vendors, and this reinforced my hesitation.  You just never know what kind of sanitation precautions are taken.  I'm sure many are perfectly fine, but to an untrained eye they are indistinguishable from the risky ones.  Poor Mika!