Chef Maiyuu’s rice with Chinese sausage (kun chiang, or กุนเชียง – another picture is here).

Pictured here with the hairy onion bit on top, and grated egg on the bottom, it looks like a giant spider about to crawl across my plate, but was actually delicious.

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Readers have invited me to get out more, and take my camera with me. Today I made it as far as the carpark building of my condo.

The carpark overlooks a slum area, where a team of five or six men is putting up this house with the blue roof.

This is the builders’ second attempt.



They put up another house just like this one, complete with the blue roof, about a month ago.

It was up only a few days, when the builders started tearing it down.

I don’t know what was wrong with the first one, but their second attempt, which you see here, is now nearing completion.

If I was truly daring I would go down and ask why they had to tear down the whole house – and why the new one, at least to my untrained eye, looks just like the last.

I jog up the ramps of the building every day, from the second storey to the seventh.

As I warm up on the second storey before starting my ascent, I look out over the slum area to check on daily progress on the house.



I bring you these pictures – taken from the second, and six levels of the carpark– just in case they decide to tear down this structure as well.

Someone should record it for posterity, as it may not be long for this world.

Not far from the house, I spotted a bunch of election hoardings (see picture), which Thais like to place around their homes, perhaps to keep out the wind.



Candidates erect them in slums, and appear to forget about them.

Or maybe, by the time campaign workers return to collect them, they have already been pinched for use as wind breaks.