Happy Diwali 2010

Happy Diwali everyone - to my family, my friends, my helpers, my readers, may the year bring you wealth, health and happiness in abundance. Marigolds are part of this celebration as are lights at your door. May your paths be flowered and floodlit.

Psychic Surgery healing in the Philippines

I am a deep sceptic about things like this but I have to say the man I met in my previous post was living evidence of this type of healing. If you are at all interested click on this link below and read more.
http://www.psychicpen.com/psychic_surgery.html

Meeting interesting people

It happened in Thailand. We met over lunch on a floating village.They were a couple on the same tour as us.I was so taken by what they were telling me that I even forgot to ask their names and at the end of the day they left and I lost them. However what I had heard and the way they talked to me kept me so engaged.So this post is for their spirit and their friendliness and the fact that they had taken every advantage of what life threw at them.

His parentage was mixed Greek and Jewish. That in itself is unusual. There are few Greek Jews and few Jews in Greece.He was born to a Greek father but a Jewish mother. His father was a stalwart of the Greek Communist party and he was assassinated when he was only two. His mother, fearing for her life fled to Cyprus where she met another man and married him. This second man raised him as if he was his son.He grew up feeling there was a piece of him missing and finally at the age of 30 he found out about his father and went to visit his family in Greece.  Bizzarly for a half Greek he had real wanderlust and spent many a year travelling all over the world exploring continents and people.

When he was back in Israel he met his love - a woman 20 years younger than he was - clearly it was a passionate and enduring love and they had three children together who they named Imagination, Magic and In God's way - they wanted their children to be distinct and special and I am sure they are. I wanted to find out more about their love affair but I didnt get the chance.He was persuaded by her to go back to University to study for a degree in chemical engineering but when his idea was taken by a superior he became disillusioned and turned to the earth to find his solace and his livelihood. He travelled to the Philippines at one point to find a healer who operated on people with her hands. He was operated on and cured and lives to tell the tale. We talked and talked and my mind was alive with scenarios, intrigue, history and adventure. Better than any soap let me tell you.

Crunching cashews

We all love them. When we are on those long flights crunching away on cashews, while sipping our drinks, we consider them a bit of a luxury and on this trip to Thailand I found out why.

Cashews grow on a bushy big tree with orange-yellow fruits which produces the kernels of nuts.What I did n't know was the painstaking work that needs to go in to producing the nuts as we know them.

Cashew nuts produce a caustic acid which can burn the skin, and noxious fumes when heated. Workers are sometimes given oil to cover their hands, but this only gives limited protection; others are given gloves, but they wear out quickly and are not favoured by workers paid on a piece rate because they affect dexterity and slow down work.  Workers shelling cashew nuts can produce between 5 and 10kg of nuts per day.The cashew kernels are roasted and then they are carefully prised open one by one to produce the nut inside.

 Each nut is placed on this giant nut cracker and the worker pushes a blade into the seal of the shell and prises it apart to extract the nut inside. They are then categorized, whole ones in one basket and broken ones in another. The work is painstakingly slow and difficult, not to mention dangerous.

The roasted nuts in their shells.

So next time you sit there devouring them, spare a thought for the workers who produce them for you and make sure you buy ones where the workers are fairly rewarded for the work they do.India is one of the biggest producers of cashew nuts in the world.

The island of Phi Phi

There are some magical islands in Thailand and the temptation to lose oneself on them is great. We had the pleasure to take a day excursion out to Phi Phi island where we enjoyed the wonderful coral reef and the fabulous marine life.

We saw Godefroy's sea cucumber, which was a pale grey sluggish sausage thing with grey spots, black diadema sea urchins with massively long spikes, the boring clam which had a beautiful purple colour and was not boring at all and countless colourful fish.Andaman sweetlips with polka dots, longfin bannerfish,humbug damsels and yellowbook fusiliers.

 The clouds rolled in at the end of the day and we set off on the two hour journey back to Phuket amidst rolling waves and lashing winds. Mercifully we arrived.Damp but Undaunted.

James Bond Island

Few people in the world dont recognise the name James Bond and 007 - but Thailand has its own claim to fame with the hero and that is the island of Ko Ping Kan which was used to make the film "The Man with the Golden Gun".Better known as James Bond Island it is a small island with a beautiful rock called Ko Tapu rising from the sea, where thousands of visitors are photographed against a backdrop of azure coloured seas, green canopies and hugely impressive rocks coming out of the Andaman sea.

Now the real give away is which James Bond hero do you associate with Roger Moore,Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan or Daniel Craig ?  

Cabbages and Condoms

Shopping in the never ending markets of Bangkok can be exhausting. There are roads and roads of stalls, malls and malls of floors with everything one can imagine, just reproduced a million times over. So one of the rewards of all this consumerism is a good meal and this restaurant is one of the famous ones in Bangkok.

The restaurant has a very firm and clear purpose other than feeding hungry foreigners and that is to promote safe sex and family planning. It generates income to support development activities of the Population and Community Development Association. As a side line it does great food in a wonderful setting among these eye catching models with a message all over them.

These models are dressed solely in condoms.

Condoms come with your bill too.

They cover the lamps, they are on the mugs sold in the shop, they are widely promoted and the wonderful thing is that this effort has been largely succesful with Thailand having a very high rate of condom use which of course not only prevents unwanted pregnancies but protects women against sexually transmitted disease.

Oh and the food was excellent.