Category: travel

Bangkok (March 2016)

Below are two dozen photos of a weekend trip to Bangkok. We stayed in Chinatown, tolerated the inevitable traffic, ate good Chinese and Thai food, visited the Suan Pakkad Palace Museum and window-shopped.

Out the window, I glimpsed a Ronald McDonald statue making the traditional Thai greeting (pressing his hands together); a business sign saying “Creative Accounting” that my husband finds particularly amusing; and a mural depicting two aliens in a lotus pond, one of whom looks like a wookie and is holding a popscicle (?!).

Fortunately, I spotted the alien mural while we were at a stoplight and took a photo, so you can see it, too. (The longer you look at it, the weirder it gets.)

Continue reading Bangkok (March 2016)

Fruit that looks like other objects

We bought this collection of objects (tray and wooden fruit) on our trip to Bali and Lombok, Indonesia.

It occurred to me that each fruit looks like some other object.

The one on the left, which would look like a star in cross-section, is a starfruit. It’s the most familiar of this batch to a North American.

The one that looks like a grenade is a durian. Those are famous for being stinky and prickly.

The scaly fig is a snake fruit (aka Salak). I ate one off a tree while hiking through the woods. It was sticky.

The one at the top is, I think, a rose apple (water apple), and looks like a nose in cross section. This one, however, looks very pear-like and has what look like leaves or a flower at the bottom, which is not typical in my experience. It might also be a pomegranate (delima); that would explain the structure at the bottom but not the pear shape.

The one that looks like a soccer ball is… actually I don’t know. Maybe a sugar apple (custard apple, srikaya)?

We figure we probably overpaid because the guy running the shop gave us the pear-looking-thing for free. I think he also wrote a lower selling price on the receipt and pocketed the difference.

Nevertheless, we love these strange wooden objects. They’re well made, and the detail on the snake fruit, in particular, is amazing.