Category Archives: Thailand

Lightning Strike More Than Once 2008

Songkran signals the approach of the rainy season. The collision of wet warm fronts with hot dry fronts stimulate epic lightning storms. My girlfriend always insisted on shutting off every electrical device in the house other than the fans. Thais shiver in fear of a lightning strike with good reason. Everyone knew someone who had […]

Sublime Frequencies: Shadow Music Of Thailand

Lawang Jesus 2020

I’m thousands of miles away from Thailand. I wished I could click my heels and find myself in Sri Racha with my family, but instead I shut my eyes and visualize Easter morning on Pattaya’s Beach Road. Most Christian farangs are sleeping off celebratory drunks, hoping to rise from the dead for a recuperative beer […]

Finite Immortality – Pattaya – 2010

The Thai people pride themselves in the purity of their language. Few English words have infiltrated the common lexicon. Dtam-ruaat is the word for police. The diphonic annunciation can confuse most farangs. I thought for years that For years I thought Dtam-ruaat meant ‘make blood’, however make blood is spelled Dtam-leuuat with a falling accent […]

NAPS OF THAILAND by Peter Nolan Smith

When a Chinese general was asked about the defeat of the People’s Army by the Vietnamese in 1979, he replied, “We get up at 5am and they get up at 4.” The draconian work ethic of NVA seemed to have been sapped by the torrid climes closer to the equator, because Thais and Laotians are […]