The New Neighbourhood Spirit House Redux

This time with a fleet of vehicles

In earlier versions of the Bangkok Blog, I spent a fair amount of time discussing the Old Neighbourhood Spirit House.  It had an illustrious history full of stories about the Rat Nation, lunar years and of the life on the streets that surrounded it.  But I moved on and so did it, when the community decided to replace the old Spirit Houses with new shiny versions.  There are lots of stories about this old house.  This is the last one.  If you’re interested, it has links to older stories.

When I moved to the new neighbourhood, nearer to the main hospital campus, I thought I would be writing regular columns about the New Neighbourhood Spirit House, but there was not too much to say.  It is beautifully maintained and very peaceful, with none of the intrigue of the old Spirit House.  There are no rats, no messes.  It’s just clean and shiny.  The last real story about this house was written in June 2015.

During this trip, I decided to take another, closer, look at the New Neighbourhood Spirit House, just to see if there is anything interesting or different going on.  In order to meet the goals of publishing one entry a day during my visits, I thought, what the hell, let’s do a New Neighbourhood Spirit House entry.  There might be at least one person who might be interested.

So what’s new?  Not much really.  The Spirit House continues to be lovingly looked after.  Everything is in great shape.  There are many human and animal guards and helpers present, including cats, elephants, horses and of, course, zebras.  One thing that did seem a bit odd were a number of cars and trucks parked in the basement garage.  For example, there was a Mini Cooper and what appeared to be an Audi.  There was a street racer car and a small convertible. Parked deeper in the garage were an all terrain vehicle and, I think, some trucks.  These were some pretty expensive vehicles and I wonder why they were there.  Perhaps the Spirits take the occasional road trips.  There are a lot of cars, so maybe there are convoys that often go out.  Or maybe this group of Spirits operate a fleet or a Spirit-Uber type operation for other Spirits. Who knows. Vehicles are not often seen in Spirit Houses – at least I have never seen them – so this need for vehicles is interesting and a bit mysterious.  It seems like they are all as well taken care of as the buildings under which they are parked.  I’ll now keep my eye on my New Neighbourhood Spirit House, just to see what’s up on the vehicle transport front.