A Trip to Thailand and Laos

Last year I had the privilege of spending 5 weeks in Thailand and Laos. The people are wonderful, friendly, helpful, kind, infinitely forgiving of foreigners' faux pas, and they love to party! The land and climate are so different from BC! Cost of getting there is high, cost of being there is very low.

You will not starve. You will struggle with the heat and humidity, showers that may just trickle, some toilets that you may have to squat over to use. You may travel in buses that are old and rickety on roads that may not exactly be the TransCanada or Germany's Autobahn. If you are lucky enough you may find a seat on the trains with fans and windows that open. And you will love it there.

Trying to compress 5 weeks of travel into a blog post is well nigh impossible so I will occasionally post a few pics and write a bit about my impressions. Starting now:

We flew from Vancouver to Tokyo's Narita Airport. I was very sad actually and the reason is that in all of the reading about other cities the thing you never experience is the smell of a place. Mexico City has a certain smell - of hot dust, charred corn from the market stalls, clean clothes. In Paris you can smell the dampness of the Seine River, smell 2,000 years of people living, eating, dying, growing things, breathing. So, emerging from the jet at Narita, I was looking forward to knowing what Japan smelled like. Only to be disappointed by the hermetically sealed building. I could look out the windows at a view suspiciously like Vancouver's - flat airport concrete, gray, rain, mist. But no scent - Narita is just another sterile concrete and glass building. Could be anywhere.

On to Bangkok. Built on, around and over the Chao Phraya River and an intricate canal system close to the where the delta empties into the Gulf of Thailand. The predominant scents are river, fish, heat, humidity, vehicle exhaust, people, food cooking - it's a wonderfully heady richness. The place itself is big, noisy, a delightful mixture of old and new, traditional and ultra-modern - in clothing, architecture, transportation, shipping, available foodstuffs, buildings going up, buildings coming down, people, people, people!

View from the Bangkok Skytrain. The mix of horrendously complicated wiring and the intricate carvings on the roofs, foodstands everywhere, motorbikes, scooters, real estate signs. Busy city 24/7

We took a day to wander up and down the river, hopping on and off water taxis to explore. Very inexpensive and a wonderful way to see what Bangkok is really all about.

This might be a restaurant. Plenty of these are usually associated with the finer hotels that line the river banks.

A royal palace?

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Not great pics. Was having trouble with my camera. And I always seemed to be in motion!
More later.
Cheers

Vancouver Aquarium - Jellies!!!

Wandering around the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park in Vancouver Canada is a great way to spend a few hours. Easily accessible by bus and car.

They have just opened a Jellyfish exhibition that takes up two large rooms. The Aquarium also rents out these rooms for private events - I recently attended a wedding there. Food, service, dancing while the softly lit jellies fluttered about in their super-sized
tanks. Beautiful!

Here are a few photos of what to expect. None do justice, of course. These are just the appetizers.

Enjoy ...

OH!!! And an FYI:

"Vancouver’s Stanley Park was named the best park in the world this week, according to TripAdvisor’s first ever Travellers’ Choice Awards. New York City’s 840-acre Central Park took second place, while Colorado’s Garden of the Gods was third place". ~THE PROVINCE JUNE 29, 2013 3:05 PM

My Veggie Garden

 Well, okay. Not exactly a garden. Just an experiment with some herbs and snap peas. I am fortunate that my tiny balcony gets sunlight from late morning onward. It is a covered balcony so I can sit outside and read year round. In fact, during high summer temps it gets rather too hot so I hang two panels of sheer fabric to protect my plants and myself from dehydration and burning.

Anyway, the snap peas are living in plastic salad and bulk candy containers and share space with geraniums and some herbs. I cut little flaps in each container about an inch (2cm) from the bottom for drainage and aeration, popped in some good quality soil and added 5 starter plants about 4 weeks ago.

Not wanting to block the view with a wood trellis or long dowels, and having two hooks in place already, I ran fishing line from the small trellis (see pics below) up to the hooks. Added another line between the two hooks and have added extra lines that hang down from the horizontal one. Works like a charm; the pea tendrils curl around the fishing line quite happily and I don't have to worry about any latent chemicals that might be impregnated in the wood.

As much as I love my balcony it does have drawbacks. Even though it faces south and manages to draw a lovely breeze from the water there still seems to not be enough air circulation to prevent thrips, aphids and other pests for making themselves at home in the soil and on the leaves. The result has been that after years of experiments I've pretty well had to settle for tough hardy plants like geraniums, aloe and wood sorrel that are resistant. So the peas really are an experiment. But YAY!!! There are pea pods! There are still thrips; those tiny little fly-things that live in the soil and fly out every time the plants get watered. But now they fly right onto the bright yellow bug strips and stick there. Muahaha.

The peas look kind of spindly but they are producing so I have stepped up the seaweed fertilizer schedule. The herbs are two kinds of rosemary, oregano, basil and thai basil, chives and cilantro. The blue paperback is King of the Vagabonds (Book 2 of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle). Brilliant and funny. Magazine is Wired. I hid the ashtray so you wouldn't know I smoked.

Sadly, by early August I had to admit defeat. The bugs destroyed the plants but I did manage to harvest some peapods. They were yummy, crunchy and sweet.

***I did read on-line about spraying plants with a very weak dishsoap/water solution. Haven't seen a bug since spraying the surviving herbs every second day for a week. I'll try growing peas again next spring. The bugs did not bother the hens and chicks, geraniums, aloe or wood sorrel.

Cheers :)