Chiang Mai Times: What is 'Suay'?

Welcome to PlaaPlaaPlaa!

So you may be wondering why PlaaPlaaPlaa? What are those strange fish symbols above? What is ปลา and what does it mean? In short, this is a blog site, so surely there's going to be plenty of rambling. Unfortunately BlahBlahBlah was already taken, so I had to settle for the 'Plaa'. But there's actually more to it then just ramblings. The first fish symbol is actually a Christian symbol meaning ICTHUS - a greek acronymn which means "Jesus Christ is God's Son, the Saviour". The other strange letters you see in the last fish is actually the thai word for fish which funnily enough is pronounced "Plaa". So when you put it all together, this site is going to be my ramblings in telling people about how Jesus Christ is God's Son, the Saviour in Thailand (with plenty of good stories about food in between). Happy reading.

Monday, March 24, 2008

What is 'Suay'? - ie beautiful?

Not that making things look 'beautiful' has ever really been one of my strong points, but i'm fast discovering that over here, appearance and 'beauty' is really important and thai's will go to extraordinary lengths to make things as beautiful as possible. The past week has been a steep learning curve of trying to work out what is beautiful here and what is not and all i can take away from it is that i've got a LOT to learn about what Thai's consider beautiful. In all honesty, it seems that their idea of beautiful is the complete opposite of whatever i consider beautiful. So right now, i'm kinda just doing the opposite to what i personally would like if it were for me.

So what do i do when i'm given a wedding cake to decorate? well, apart from freak out and try to convince them that they're nuts in asking me to do it, i figure as long as i can add pink to it somewhere (pink is BIG in this country), and do to it what i probably would not do for me, everything would be ok. So this was the end result?

So now, i'm a really talented individual who is very clever at decorating cakes now too. i'm seriously hoping and praying that i won't have to do any more! :)

So, here are a few other shots of Oum's wedding