Wednesday, February 06, 2008
whew!
it was a mad rush to sort out all the things i bought, pack up my room for cny, do spring cleaning. preparation completed!
haha on a side note b4 i start recounting my "adventures" in thailand, 32gb ipod touch is out! man that's like the holy grail of mp3 player for me. but the price of $848 is simply way too hot to handle. for now i am contented with my 30gb ipod video until either the following happpens-my current ipod dies or the price drop to something affordable like $458? haha.
anyway thailand is a nice place to visit. although i didnt get to visit bangkok, the people, food, place left a good impression on me and definitely if given another chance i will go visit thailand again.
Weather-Hot and dry during the day, super cold n windy at night. rarely rain.
Food-Very similar to chinese food. Beef and Pork prefered as choice of meat. Their chili sauce is sweet. Must try item-Local Beef noodle soup.
Transport-No famous "tutus" in lopburi town but they got sort of a modified pickup truck where behind got seats for around 10 people and motocycle taxi (didnt get the chance to try it) where you are the passenger of a normal motorbike and the rider will ring you to wherever you want to go.
Shopping-Things are seriously cheap here. Advice for travellers trying to break the language barrier. All you need is just a mini calculator, shout "pang" and give the "i cant believe you are charging me so expensive for something so cheap" look. Some people are better at pulling that off, while i only managed to succeed only once. Anyway no need bargain already very cheap already. Bargaining is just for the fun and the interaction between the shopkeepers.
People-The thais are a friendly and polite bunch of people from my experiences. They are helpful also often trying to guide us to either which transport to take, how to go to the place we are looking for.
Many experiences that i had until i dunno where to begin or what to tell.
Let's see, i took C-130 there, terribly uncomfortable, base camp was great, blankets and pillow were provided while i used my own $40 safari bed bought from beach road in a huge 12 man tentage. water for showering was from 2 big water tanks, quite "chui" but better then nothing. deployment site was 1 big patch of open field with lots of traps-cow dung! haha cows roam our deployment site daily with a cowpard(shepard for sheeps, cowpard for cows?)
Lopburi town is 1hr bus journey from base camp and the bus that will fetch us there always late!
One of my most memorable experience was visiting this eatery where the pic showed noodles with chicken 10 baht (arnd 45 cents) so we were like wha so cheap, in the end when the noodles arrived, the portions was so small that it only lasted 1 mouth. Another one was that we visited this Beef eatery. Their menu got english and thai so obviously we pointed what we wanted on the english menu. so our food came, but got 2 plate of egg which we didnt ordered and we were short of the rice that we thought we had ordered. After considerable effort to communicate with the waitress, we realised that the english menu and the thai menu were not in sync, the order for the eng menu was egg omelette rice while the thai one was omelette rice egg.
There was one particular shoping experience that was worth mentioning. We went to some sort of street shopping like bugis street in singapore and my friend wanted to try on this pair of jeans to see if it fits. So the shopkeeper handed him a big piece of cloth and the rest of us began laughing. In the end, he found one corner, and my other friend held the cloth to cover him while i was holding on the unit video cam, taking important footage to bring back for the rest to see.
Came back on Fokker 50, more decent and can pass off as an SIA flight seriously. The experience is good but staying away from home 2 weeks is a very long time and there are many times i cant wait to get back home.
hoping to meet up with you guys soon. maybe for dinner or catch a movie, lots of shows during this period(haven done that for quite a while, the previous movie cloverfield was a disaster) or go someone's house to eat up their cny goodies and play mahjong. that counts as an idea right?
-jun rong
dived at 2/06/2008 05:38:00 PM.
