Lazy Sunday

Yesterday was spent doing errands. I was able to plug into the modem at the Guest House front office directly this morning to post and check email.. The router for the wifi wasn’t working. Then I went off to do my errands - get Thai money, get a sim card and program for my Thai cell phone
that we bought last year, lunch, found a bike shop, but put that on hold, got a bunch of bananas, then came home. All this I did in a big mall that everything I needed with air conditioning. But I really hate these malls. The picture is where I bought the cell phone, one of about 50 similar little cell phone shops in the same location at the mall.




While things are very commercial, there are still hints of old Thai culture like this Wat (temple.)








This is a typical street scene. When the bicycles became motorcycles and then cars, the streets just weren't ready and pedestrians and bikes really get little consideration in the infrastructure.


Here's another temple I walked through on the way back to the Pooh Cottage Guest House where I'm staying.




Melissa, the volunteer who had moved out last night was back because she’d left her towel here. She told me a little about apartment hunting and showed me the apartment she’d chosen, about a five minute walk away. The street is an expat section with lots of high rise apartment/condotels in all stages of construction. Her room is a spare white hotel room like setup. The main attraction is a large swimming pool on the third floor. B5000 /month, or about $150. But it’s pretty barren - lots of concrete, very little green. I felt a little guilty, I guess I should have spent the day looking at apartments. But she lives in New York City and so she’s more intuned with that sort of activity. We’ll see what the people at my organization have in mind for me.

Here's Melissa's pool.


We agreed to meet at 6:30 and go to the Sunday Night market. The weather was comfortable in the evening and we walked around a lot and found a very plain Thai restaurant with good food in the middle of the market.

Today Grib picks me up at 9:45am to take me to meet the staff at my NGO (Non-Governmental Organization.) I'm staying a little vague my work relationship with these people is more important than blogging. I'll try to write about this in as much detail as I can without compromising confidentiality and general human trust.