For the past couple of months I’ve been trying to wipe the smug smile off my face - completely without success. It seems to me that I must have had a premonition regarding the impending winter. Right up until my departure from NZ in early May, I felt an odd sense of urgency to abandon ship… 
Reports of minus 12C in Hanmer Springs, and torrential rains at home on the West Coast, and a metre of snow here and there have made me feel extremely thankful I’m not participating!
Life in Thailand, by contrast, is rather pleasant! Well, today I did get caught without an umbrella in a monsoon deluge… but it was still at least 28C, and whilst I got damp around the edges, I was able to shelter under a shop verandah and pass the time with an expresso coffee and watch the girls go by! Quite bedraggled, some of them, but bloody gorgeous all the same!
Do you like mango - those unbelievably nice yellow ones, dripping with juice? Or pineapple and watermelons, ditto? For breakfast? Every morning? My god, I love Thailand!
Now I’m a country boy through and through… but Bangkok has to be the one of the most amazing places on the planet to live. The extraordinary contrasts between rich and poor, old and new are just amazing! Standing under a shop verandah, watching old ladies trying to erect tarpaulins over street stalls, street food vendors with wheeled carts trying to prevent their wares from getting drenched, and BMW’s and Benz’s negotiating the sheets of water on the streets… all this to a backdrop of skyscrapers and high-rise construction cranes, lightning flashes mixed with welding flashes, thunder mixed with buses and tuk-tuks…
My girlfriend and I live in an new apartment building in the central city, about 5 minutes walk to the Victory Monument BTS Skytrain station. Most of the city’s major malls are only a few minutes away. The Skytrain, coupled with the underground system, makes navigation around central Bangkok very easy. Hell, we’ve got taxis going past our back door that charge less than $8 for the 30-40 minute trip to the international airport! So, its like $2 to go 10 minutes to the MBK Shopping Mall…. or $1.50 to get to Pantip Plaza computer mall if there is any tech stuff required. Not only that, but at Pantip Plaza they got shit we ain’t even seen in NZ yet!
Broadband - available in most apartment buildings throughout the city… we pay 900 baht a month (NZ$35) for a shared 1mb connection. Through the day its great because everyone else is at work and I’m the only one on-line! Weekends are little more problematic…
I walk out the front door onto the little “soi” or lane - walk 100 metres to either end and there are fruit stalls and street food vendors all over the place - its like living on the edge of the Christchurch Arts Centre!
It is hot as hell though, some days! 35C, and the traffic is a nightmare that you have to participate in to fully comprehend… truly, it makes “Spaghetti Junction” in Auckland look like a quiet country road… The amazing thing is that everyone is so philosophical and laid-back about it.
My second 30 day allocation is about up, and in a few days I am off to do the “Visa Run” thing again with Claudio at www.ThaiVisaService.com - time certainly flies when you are having fun! Well, I’ve finished my bottle of Jack Daniels anyway, so its high time I went back to Cambodia for lunch again…
Me and Claudio are quite good friends now - his web site was bloody dreadful, so last time around I offered to rebuild it for him in return for discounted visa trips! Looks pretty sharp now, and has jumped from zero to rank No.1 on www.google.co.th for “bangkok visa run”
