This first batch of pictures is from Genevieve's Bithday party that we had in a small town outside of Bangkok, near Nakhon Prathom. We were staying with Jin, my father's girlfriend. She was really amazing, sweet, generous hospitable, fun, just great to stay with. She took us out every day to temples, to an elephant show, to go prawn fishing, and swimming at an outdoor pool on the beautiful grounds of a christian university near her house. The first day we were there we all drove up to the Big C store, which is like a Thai wallmart. She asked us what kind of food we liked and we replied (a common phrase here) "Up to you!". She bought a bunch of thai foods and refused to let us pay. She physically rejected the money we tried to give the cashier. From then on she cooked us thai meals twice a day that were much too large to come close to finishing. She'd make little dishes of pork, noodles, whole fishes, and vegetarian stuff for genevieve. At first she had a hard time grasping the whole veg concept ("Ah.. no eat meat. Can eat fish?" "No." "Ahh.. i see. Pork?") but she eventually figured it out. She said she'd never met anyone who never ate meat. "I think good luck for, to meet you." she figured.
The other people in Jin's neighborhood were really great, too. The day before Genevieve's birthday, one of Jin's neighbor, who was a hotshot young insurance salesman (we learned this because on one singha-blurry night he brought out a plaque his company had given him: him wearing a cowboy hat in an old west motif bearing the headline: #1 salesman in the West!) took a picture of us and the next day has it screened onto a cake with frosting bunnies and candy pebbles. We ate and drank and played with the wild little kids out in Jin's peaceful alley and stayed up listening to old thai songs by Carabao. It was great.