Welcome to my humble blog which accompanies my humble website Globalwanderings. Originally, I just had a website to post pictures and travelogues of my times spent in various countries while working for the British Council. But upon arriving in Bangkok, I thought it was time to join the billions of other self obsessives and start a blog – so here it is. A bit late in starting as we arrived in Bangkok almost 3 months ago, but better late than never.
I hope to post something every week about little quirks of living in Bangkok, little bits of trivia and minor culture shocks which seem to occur every day.
Of course the first thing about moving to a new country is getting settled in the job and finding a house – boring. My first real job was to get a new computer, so I headed down to Panthip Plaza. It was gobsmacking. I am no computer geek but even I had my chin on the floor when I saw 6 floors of wall to wall computer shops surrounding an inner atrium, lights flashing and dodgy blokes whispering ‘sexy movie?’ to me. As well as providing tons of hardware – there were also tons of accompanying (pirated) software, CDs, DVDs etc. So much for Thailand’s crack down on piracy. Even ignoring everything but desktops there were still simply too many shops make any disciplined choice. So I just picked one at randowm, gave them my specs and picked up my computer the next day for a fraction of the price in the UK. So far (2 months down the track) I’ve had no problems. Since then I’ve hooked up to 24 hour broadband at home which costs an amazing 500Bht (£7) per month and I’m away.
Managing to stay away from my new toy at home has been tough, but I have managed to do a bit of sightseeing which I’ll cover in my website, but the trip from my house to the skytrain station (Ari) and on to work has been interesting in itself. During my second week here I happened to be walking down the road as normal in my own little world when I noticed that everyone else was stock still on the pavement, what was going on? Had time frozen? I could also hear some music and then it dawned on me – it was the national anthem. I was later to hear that at 8am every morning and 6pm at night, the public address system blares out the national anthem and everyone within earshot stops stock still for about 20 seconds. Bizarre. The traffic never stops though – it still continues at a crawl.
