Strolling and Feeding Fish in the Nong Bua Park, Thailand.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know the above girl is my niece Nong Ja. She is Miss Noot’s older sister’s baby and we get to look after her a lot.

We have had the privilege of babysitting or even raising Nong Ja to an extent over the early 13 months of her life. If you are a regular to Thailand you know that Thais and the raising of children aren’t like that back in the western society. Many young mothers leave kids with their parents, grandparents or relatives to raise while they go to work to earn money for the family.

I never agreed with this as I didn’t like the parents of the baby neglecting the duty of parenting but overtime I have come to accept this. Nong Ja’s parents, Jack and Joom work odd hours and often early into the morning.

Miss Noot doesn’t have to go back to University until the end of October so she has been looking after Nong Ja every day. This is obviously something she loves to do but has also been a real eye opener. Usually we will have her 3 or 4 nights, so a few breaks in between. The last 3 to 4 weeks we have had her every day and Miss Noot is now realizing how much work a small baby can be.

Thankfully Nong Ja is a great baby, she sleeps well, eats anything. She eats any vegetable you cook for her, I am often surprised when I give her something new and she just chomps it down. I tell Miss Noot how lucky we are that she is like this.

Anyway, we try to get Ja out of the house as much as we can, she loves going on ‘tour’ as we call it. This means the shopping centre, market, in the garden or to the park. Here the 3 girls of my life, Ben, Ja and Miss Noot are strolling in my local park Nong Bua.

The local park is a minute away from our house and the lake is full as we have been getting plenty of rain of late. This causes a few problems at the park as it floods the walking/running track in places.

This is a common sight after a lot of rain, dead fish. Often I see small fish dead and thought the water must be polluted but there is an abundant life of fish in this lake as you will see.

And Nong Ja was running towards the area where we feed the really big fish, the first time I saw these fish I was a little shocked at the size of them.

And the fish start to come to the top of the water as soon as they see or sense your presence, these are the little guys.

The fish feeding started.

And it wasn’t long before the big fellas started to pop their heads out of the water.

Then the numbers started to grow and they started to jostle over the food.

There are some large orange coloured carp, they get released by people who are making merit and have grown over the years.

Some the real big guys, we didn’t see today, I would say that they would be pushing the 15kg plus mark and are great to see up close. Maybe they were full already.

The sun started to go down slowly and this is when many people come out.

This is very popular, aerobics. There are two areas where aerobics takes place each evening in the park.

Basketball is another popular sport as well.

This is Sepak Trakaw and very popular in Asian countries. I have video footage of this game and you can watch it here if you like.

And many families, couples and also students love to do this, painting the 20 Baht canvasses.

This is the other aerobics area in the park.

Here two girls are happily sitting and painting the cares away.

What every girl loves, Doraemon the super robotic cat.

It wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour or so in the afternoon.

Brunty