Oddball Update

Today begins the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Pig (or Boar, if you will). Here in Thailand, where much of the population is of Chinese ancestry, it’s a cultural event on the order of our own Gregorian New Year back home. Many people (including myself) wear bright red shirts on this day for good luck. Yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, we spent much of the day celebrating the new year in traditional style.

One of the things families do is burn faux paper money and gold as an offering to their ancestors, that they might enjoy these riches in the afterlife. Another part of the ceremonies is the preparation of a huge meal which we offer to those past. At night, the Chinese temple across the street blocks off the road and sets up a big movie screen in the middle of it, after which they play Kung Fu films and set off firecrackers all night long.

We ate home-cooked meals of traditional Chinese dishes yesterday, but in the evening we went out to a western-themed coffee shop called The Coffee Maker. This is a yuppie coffee bar type of place, in the style of the various “boutique coffee joints” in the U.S. You can drink a cappucino and eat chocolate cake along to the sounds of Norah Jones and Britney Spears. They also have a full menu of food ranging from Thai favorites to western-style spaghetti and sandwiches. Each with its own Asian flair, of course.

We were also paid a visit yesterday by Apple’s uncle, who works in the plastics industry and has made a lot of money in business. As such, he’s amassed a collection of exotic European cars that includes Mercedes, BMWs and even four Maseratis. (I hope to get a chance to see the complete collection sometime while I’m here.) Yesterday, he brought over his brand new Mercedes SLK R171 roadster, which cost over $100,000. I got to sit behind the wheel and take some pictures of it. The retractable hardtop (which can be raised or lowered by remote) is sweet. He also ordered a $3,000 performance ECM firmware from Germany, which he was able to download directly into the car via the Internet. This boosted the supercharged engine’s performance by about 40 HP. As a finishing touch he ordered a customized license plate with the number “171″ on it, to match the car’s model.

At the end of the day, we were both pretty exhausted — we’re still shaking off the jet lag a bit; so far it’s helped us get up early, but we wind up getting pretty whipped by about 8:00 in the evening. Apple fell asleep last night while in the middle of surfing the Web on my notebook. I myself finished the Star Trek: Constellations book I was reading while the firecrackers exploded outside, which means I now only have one book left — the latest Halo novelization by Eric Nylund. Better save that for the flight home, since I can’t exactly get too many English-print books here in Thailand! If I seek something to read in the meantime, I’m thinking maybe I’ll buy some eBooks from Amazon and read them on my computer.

Tomorrow is Monday, and while the New Year’s holiday means that most workers will have the next couple of days off, I’m going to start back to work on my own job in the morning. I put in a couple of hours since we arrived, but that’s about it. By Monday I should be pretty into the swing of things and able to get some stuff done.

But for the rest of today, we’re basically just taking it easy here at home!

Categorized as Life