Black House - Baan Dam, dog meat, Thai wine, and two hours in Mae Sai

Last post I took y'all to Wat Rong Khun, the White Temple.  On Friday, the 3rd, I drove north about 15 kilometers from home to Baan Dam, Black House.  Unlike the temple, this is not a temple.  Also unlike the temple, this is really an outdoor art exhibit.  The common thread being that they're both striking and how they...contrast (hehehehehe).  Seeing one after the other really was an accidental logical idea as Black House is White Temple's antithesis.

Wat Rong Khun feels like a sacred place representing the balance of life and death, peace and violence, love and malevolence -the reality of reality.

Baan Dam feels like an unholy place where death is inescapable and was probably Thawan Duchanee's intent (the creator).

Before arriving all I knew about Baan Dam was there were 40 houses situated on the property, many of which closed to non-private tours, that contained pieces of art representing death through the art and architecture.  Many of the pieces are fashioned from animal parts.



After I walked through it all and snapped my photos I recorded a 20 minute video walking through much of the place.  And again it's going to take time to get the damn thing loaded.  My video of Wat Rong Khun finally loaded to youtube...and then I was told there was an error converting the file.  I prefer to load things at night too since it's cooler and I don't have to burden my laptop so much.

I'll let the pictures do the talking and I think the video does the place more justice than the pictures, but I'll leave you with some food for thought...

In Thailand, there is a craft of fashioning magnificent tables and chairs out of what I believe were once the base and beginning of roots of a very old and large trees.  They're beautiful.  While lollygagging through one of the buildings early in my exploration I noticed benches made of such trees inside one of the houses.  Also in this tiny building were gongs small and very large (9ft?), canoes, drums, large and small baskets, baskets I think that were for catching fish, and a few dead inflated and dehydrated blowfish, go figure.
 
"Hmm"  -I thought-  "even furniture can represent death.  We unwittingly surr-" As I'm turning my head to the left I come face to face with a drum.

I felt like such a clever s.o.b.

So just think about what you're looking and maybe something like that'll pop out at you.

Le Baan Dam Album

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Afterwords I headed home, stopping at Makro to take a peek and see what's up.  Makro is Thai for Costco.

Then I went to the supermarket in the mall to pickup lunch/dinner stuff.  I noticed a white guy grabbing tons and tons of meat.

Me: "Heh, stock'n up?"

Him: *Gets kinda close, speaks kinda low* "Actually, it's for my dogs"

He then went on to make me very paranoid about my food choices.  I ended up just getting dehydrated beans to rehydrate and mix with rice to form a complete protein instead of buying meat.  Guy ruined my eff'n day and made me unreasonably paranoid.

I got back, ate some food, and started typing this up when Neung popped her head in.

Neung: What's good, wanna go to Mae Sai? (bout an hours drive north)

Me: When??

Neung: Now

Me: Now??

Neung: Uhhh (yes)

Me:

Neung:


Me:

Neung:

Me: Yea lets go.


Being in an AC'd car with somewhere to rest my back and head instead of flying on a moped was nice.  But I did notice how much longer it takes to navigate a city in a car.  Two-wheelers get to cut in front of cars at lights and that makes commutes much quicker.

In Thailand, on the side of the road you can buy quite a variety of things depending on the time of day, where you are, how far out from a town you are, and how major the road is you're on.  Over halfway to Mai Saiwe stopped at the side of the road to buy wine.  This ain't your reds and whites from home and it sure isn't rice whine either, it's an attempt at wine.  I don't know why they call it wine.  Not sure what the precise criteria is for wine so I can't make the call.

They had/have a strange smell.  Despite being made from fruit it lacks a fruity scent.  It isn't bad or offensive yet the odor makes me think of a drop of chlorine in a bucket of water -very sterile.  I think it may be the very freshly fermented smell of fruit.  The wine tastes just like that too (freshly fermented fruit) and naturally very sweet, fermented: strawberry, lychee, pick a word.  When I say you can taste it's fermented fruit that isn't to say it tastes bad, ya know like rotten fruit.

I got the feeling that the makers were on the right track but bottled the stuff before it became, ya know, real wine.  I also suspect that may have been on purpose since Thais love sweet stuff just about as much as Buddha.  All in all it aint the wine I'm used to but it's a nice drink to get a serving of alcohol, I'll say that.

There were 4 wines: Mulberry, Strawberry, Lychee, and another one I can't recall.  The strawberry and lychee were actually pretty good so I bought 2 bottles each, 75 baht a pop, 10% alcohol. 

Mae Sai is a little town sitting just on the border of Myanmar that was settled decades ago, or at least highly populated by, Chinese war veterans of a civil war (I think).  It's as Chinese as it gets without stepping foot into China.

In Mae Sai we wondered a bit and I picked up a pair of shorts and some food for nibbling.  One item being baked/roasted chestnuts. The vendors have these machines that swirl around bits of hot charcoal and the chestnuts get plopped right in until finished.  I guess I've never really had a chestnut and definitely not a tasty, cooked warm one.  So good...

We walked around a bit 'window shopping', met up with a friend of Neungs, got in the car and headed to a lil restaurant for a bite.  Driving around was neat, the streets were narrower and scaled down even more than than the other parts of

FYI Zebra tastes like white pepper

Thailand I've been to.   One of the first things I observed when I got to this country was that in the US buildings, shops, streets, ceilings...by comparison felt 'normal sized' and everything in Thailand felt like it was designed by a miniature golf course engineer.

For dinner I went meatless, just mushrooms and rice.  My earlier experience plus having seen some guy dump a bunch of loose trash in a river stifled my appetite.  Afterwards we dropped off her friend and headed back.

Neung drives fast.  Gone to plaid, fast.  Despite communication barriers watching her frustration when slow motorists didn't get out of the fast lane for her bridged the gap betwixt the cultures of East and West.  I too know that feeling and the exasperation that came after she flicked her blinker left to pass the car squatting in the right lane...

**Car blocking our Toyota traveling at warp speed**

Neung: Mumble mumble mumble

Then she's all like , in silence for a second.

She flicks the stalk behind the wheel upward for the left blinker bitterly

 *Something in Thai that was probably...*

Neung: ...*flick* ...mother fucker


 

Don't ask, I don't know