Some Sights of Thailand

The Novotel Suvarnabhumi Airport Hotel at the Bangkok Airport was a very convenient place to stay when we wanted to break up our long travel a little bit. The view from our hotel room looked out to the nice courtyard, but we did not really have time to enjoy it. The only thing we managed to do at this hotel besides sleeping was to have breakfast. For a buffet breakfast, the selection was okay, but nothing too impressive. I was particularly surprised by the lack of selection of fruits. There were only a few items, such as cantaloupe, apple, and watermelon, but nothing too exotic. For a tropical place, this was quite disappointing.

The food court at one of the Tesco Lotus shopping center. It has lots of delicious food that Samantha and I can eat, but Gary hasn’t found it very attractive. A lot of Chinese BBQ items, noodles, etc., but surprisingly, not a lot of Thai curries. I wonder why. Gary promised that once he gets more used to Thailand, he will eat here with us sometimes. It’s a promise still to be fulfilled.

View from one of the condos along Canal Road in Chiang Mai where a lot of the new condos are located. A lot of these condos are close to the mountains and the views are very beautiful. They are also more peaceful. Unfortunately, most of these condos are empty and not many people live in them. Most are owned by foreigners. Besides being too far from Samantha’s school, this is another reason why we did not choose these condos.

This is a view taken from the school campusThe white houses in the back belong to Premburi (or Greenburi), the real estate development owned by the school PTIS (Prem Tinsulanonda International School). We will be living in that development, where we can just walk to school via the back road. Can’t wait to move in there. They are currently working on the contract, without a firm move-in date. The funny thing is that they asked for a permanent address, which we did not have. We sold our house in the U.S. to move to Thailand! Pansuvan explained that they needed an oversea address to put on the contract, so we ended up giving them my brother’s address. It’s just easier to comply with something than arguing why they would need one.

The school campus is quite pretty, and quite large. Here is the view taken from the school cafeteria overlooking the school buildings across from the lake.

“Beauty Chilly in Garden” sign, whatever that means. We just found it amusing as we drove by on our way to the Sriphat medical center.

This is the Meechok Plaza where one of the Rimping Supermarket is located. The Rimping supermarkets are very popular with expats here, and the prices are unsurprisingly higher than other places.

This is the main pool in the Spa Resort, where we are staying. There is a second pool right next to the Spa restaurant. However, one day Samantha and Gary went swimming there and came back quickly, telling me that the other pool was quite dirty.

People carry all kinds of stuff here. Samantha particularly liked this one.

Rice paddy fields, a common sight outside the Chiang Mai city center.

Samantha really wants me to share with you this little black caterpillar with white fuzzy hair. She found it on the school campus. After some research on the internet, the name of this caterpillar seems to be Eupterotidae Apona.

Live show at the Makro supermarket. We had no idea what it was about, but it was very loud and well attended. They sang “Happy Birthday” song (in English), and gave out cakes to people. There were quite a few hill tribe girls in the audience, whom seemed to be special invitees. The Thais love to be entertained, and we see live shows everywhere.

Buddha statues and temples are every where in Thailand! We were driving along a country back road and kept coming across these statues and ornate temples!

You will get a fine if you do one of these things inside your car!

You can develop some serious arm muscles if you go shopping every day at a busy center. When the parking lot gets busy and the normal spots are taken, then cars will start lining up perpendicular to other cars. If you are lucky enough to be blocked by these cars, then get ready for some exercise!

A Brave New Day

We made it into the city (Chiang Mai) today and back, without having any accidents. We consider that a big achievement!

We went to see Rhys at Assist Thai Visa today to get the work started on visa extension for Samantha and me. Gary has a retirement visa which allows him to stay for 12 months without leaving Thailand, but Samantha (on Education visa) and I (on Caretaker visa) can only stay up to 90 days without leaving. Our visas do allow us multiple entries within a year, so if we don’t mind doing border runs or plan to visit somewhere every 90 days, we don’t need an extension, but we don’t want to deal with the hassle.

Anyway, it was supposed to take only 40 minutes or so to get to Rhys’ office, but Google Maps did not quite do its job this morning and we kept getting lost (definitely not an operator problem as I was the one operating this). For someone who hadn’t been driving on the “wrong” side of the road for many years, Gary was doing a good job driving and hadn’t turned onto the wrong lane at all so far, so let’s hope that continues! It made me nervous just sitting in the passenger seat and seeing how close the mopeds, bikes, and the other cars were. There were even people walking across the highway with their bikes, and people multi-tasking: driving a moped and smoking! We got stopped by policemen a couple of times during our journey but once they saw the passengers, they just waved us to move on. Well, our supposedly 40 minute journey ended up taking us about 2 full hours, with Rhys sending someone from his office on a moped to lead us from the Shangri-La Hotel to their office close by.

After talking to Rhys and had a quick lunch close by, we set our target to visit Tesco Lotus, a British supermarket along the super-highway. We wanted to get a few things to make our place more livable and stop eating out all the time. We were hoping for a British Tesco experience, but the Tesco Lotus here was more like a department store with a large food section as well. We found almost everything that we needed to get, except for garbage bags and cereal. I used the Google translator to translate “garbage bags” into Thai and Gary showed it to a staff there and we found our bags. For the cereal though, Gary was led to an aisle for grains, not quite the box cereal we had in mind. Anyway, we had enough of this and decided to check out.

As the cashier was scanning our items, she stopped when she reached the 3 beer bottles that Gary wanted. She pointed to a sign to Gary and put the beer aside, not into our basket.

Apparently in Thailand, you cannot buy alcohol early in the morning, nor in the early afternoon. I don’t quite understand why but I was not unhappy with this outcome!

As we were getting ready to leave Tesco for the Resort, I finally got Google Maps working properly and now a nice female voice was giving Gary the driving instructions, instead of me monitoring the little dot on Google Maps and trying to tell him to turn left or right. This had a very calming effect on Gary. I wondered if I could borrow that voice to tell Gary to do other things, such as giving up on alcohol.

When we got back to our rental, we saw an army of men working in our house, with all the doors and windows wide open, inviting in the ever friendly bugs and mosquitos. Oh, I forgot to mention that the pipe in the kitchen sink that was “fixed” yesterday did not really work and water was coming out from the pipe this morning when Gary tried to use it. Needless to say, Gary contacted Robin immediately and asked him to send someone else (who knows what they are doing) to fix this ASAP. As we all know that quantity does not equal quality, the many men working on this issue haven’t fixed the problem today. As I am typing right now, the pipe that was installed yesterday has been taken off and there is a bowl sitting at the bottom of the open kitchen sink pipe to catch any water should we be foolish enough to turn on the faucet. Gary declared that he would find a new place in town for us tomorrow and move out, never mind the money we’ve paid. I think we should ask for a discount.

Samantha has been a pretty good girl all day, mostly staying quiet when her parents were arguing about driving directions, and only occasionally burst into singing. Her only complaints today were the same complaints she had for the last few days: Robin and Daddy were talking too much, and her mosquito bites are itchy. She was doing her “Itchy Mosquito Bites” dance for us in the bedroom, rolling back and forth on our bed and chanting “itchy, itchy, itchy”, but that was too entertaining to catch on video and she made it clear that she did not wish to share that with anyone else.

So another mundane day in Chiang Mai with very little achieved. Our plan tomorrow is to visit the bank and to look for a more suitable long-term rental. Wish us luck…