An update and random observations

I’ve now been in Bangkok for about 5 days. I spent most of my time just unpacking, buying lots of stuff and arranging the apartment. The new office chair and desk are arriving today and with that I’ll be done with setting the place up. It’s taken a lot less time than usual to get things done as I’ve had tons of help, translation ’services’, and a ‘tour guide’ ;-) for where to get stuff. The new apartment looks better and is more spacious than the previous one I was at in Singapore. It has its share of issues - lighting on the wall instead of on the ceiling and relatively old water heaters but other than that it’s a very pleasant living environment. The condo building management is also very helpful so far.

Between all the rushing everywhere to get things done a couple of things stood out and reminded me I’m in a totally new place despite having traveled here a lot and the similarities with other Asian places I’ve lived in. Here are two of them.

1. The gf and me were heading out late night for dinner and sat at a street stall selling noodles just across the road from my apartment. As we were munching on our dinner my gf gazed over my shoulder and then remarked in a completely natural manner: “I don’t understand why people would walk a baby elephant in the street”. It took a couple of seconds to digest that (I don’t mean the noodles) and I turned my head and indeed someone was walking a small elephant behind us.

2. We moved some stuff I stored at my gf’s place on previous visits over to my place and because there were a few suitcases we took two separate taxis. After I loaded them up and got in I told the driver to go to my place and in return got a blank stare. He obviously didn’t know where the place was, so I said follow the other taxi. That helped for about 2 min as the taxi in front went through green light and we got stuck at the junction as it turned to red. With Bangkok’s massive traffic I might as well have asked him to use the stars to navigate to my place. So now what.. I can’t even direct a taxi to take me back to my new home. A few more attempts at explaining where the place was, which street, which area etc. and he finally managed to decipher my bad pronunciation of the Thai names of the street.

All in all the move has gone smoothly and the main thing now will be to make sure I can do my work properly. Will be interesting to see tonight how the internet connection performs, I already noticed lag and connectivity issues. We’ll see if I need to invest in more technology to get the job done.

Other possibly related posts:

• links for 2007-11-15
• Late day entries
• Putting more money to work