Boys with Toys

There isn't a quiet place in Thailand. Construction work, mosques, roosters, dogs, loudspeakers regularly drive Farangs to self-mutilation, murders most foul, or plain sobbing. My place was actually quiet for a whole month before construction work started on the neighbouring house. They tore it down and are now digging foundations so deep I might not even have a view from my balcony in a few months time.

I decided the only way to fight back was to hang out on the construction site, be a part of it, you know. I can't really describe what they're doing because it's so complicated, uses so many cables, consists of so many steps, and yet is performed so quickly and seamlessly. It's a ballet of relative grace considering they're playing around with machines the size of trucks that swing about bullet-shaped things that probably weigh close to a ton, drop them, pick them up again, all this as the workers rig and unrig the "bullets" to pencil thick cables. All the "bullets" have different shapes, and they look like they're going to crush some guy any moment as they drop and roll about.