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Our man in...
Good evening,
I guess you must all be at work now. Sorry, I'm just thinking aloud (well, not really as I'm typing but anyway), I think i'm comfortable with the time shift but it is strange to think I'm half way through my day when you wake up (it's seven hours difference). I have moved out of Bangkok and i'm now part of a tour going around various sites in the north of Thailand for the next week. So a brief run down of that goes like this...
Went to see Kaho Yai national park yesterday and in particular a couple of caves that are equal home to some bats and some meditating monks. They seem to get on ok without any domestics. At dusk we saw the bats leaving the caves in big hoardes. All very David Attenborough. Today we went to a town called Phi Mai and visited an ancient Khem temple complex which was a smaller version of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Afterwards the night market. I tried my best to fit in with the locals but it's a bit tricky when you're a pasty faced "farang" (the word for foreigner) and your attempts to indicate you're full up (by rubbing your stomach) when you see trays of baked grasshoppers, scrpions and cockroaches are greeted by laughter. I have discovered that Thai cuisine can be very delicios but it only has two many staples...rice and coconut. The discerning amongst you may know I would rather eat the grasshopper than a coconut. Tomorrow i'm off to see some more temples....
...which brings me nicely to my top ten things about Thailand so far. Cue "a whole lotta love" by Led Zeppelin...
Temples: they're pretty, they're ornate, you take lots of photos of them and they're absolutely EVERYWHERE.
The King: If there's one thing more unavoidable than temples it's pictures of the king. He looks like an Asian version of Woody Island and all his many portraits are in a pose as if he is shopping in a department store. No, really.
Monks: See temples
Elephants: You gotta love them.
The roads: Apparently Thais drive on the left but it took me days to notice as it was a mission to cross one.
Football: Surprisingly high profile here. Everton are sponsored by Chang beer (brewed in bangkok) along with ever present Liverpool and some Man Utd
Lady boys: I can now safely identify one at one hundred metres. No further comment.
Winter: This is Thai winter. I like winter, its only about 25 -30C
Ah, run out of time on the machine.
Bye.
And look at the STA log it has pictures
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