I Love The Smell Of Napalm In The Morning!

Good Morning (from) Vietnam!

Here we are, in the land of Apocolypse Now, actually we're higher north than any American GI ever came. They were fighting here for 8 years and they never got close to Hanoi, I just had to take an hour flight from Bangkok and voila, here I am. If only the Americans knew about Air Asia!

Now Bangkok was cheap, I think I already established that. But compared to Vietnam it's as expensive as Tiger Tiger on a Saturday night!

I'm going to say this slowly......beer costs.......six (yes six, one after 5 and two before 8) pence. Now I'd read about that before coming, but it hadn't quite sunk in so I'll say it again to make sure you understand me fully. A glass of beer costs 6p. That's 100 glasses for 6 pounds. Or 666 glasses for the 40 pounds I usually spend on a night out! Or 1500 glasses for the 90 quid I spent on the last day of lectures!
Unfortunatly the closing time for bars around here is midniught, which means that although you get a lot of beer for your money, you don't have much time to drink it! Not that that's much of a problem here, they have a custom where if one person in a bar proposes a toast, everyone must down their drink. And once they see us white folks in the bar they want to show us how better drinkers they are and therefore insists on a toast every 20 bloody seconds!

We're staying in a hotel which is undoubtedly dodgy. It has the same name as a real, posh hotel in the city. They try and lure people there, pretending to be the real hotel. They even get taxi drivers to pick up the real hotel's customers at the airport and bring them to theirs! To be honest though I don't really care. It costs less than 3 quid a night, we get a clean bed (double bed though so have to share with my flatmate) a shower, cable TV with English channels and a free breakfast. Oh and a toilet.

Now, if you're eating a sandwich while you read this, take a little break and finish your food. Because, and I never thought I'd say this line, I think it's about time I talked to you about toilets.

Now I consider myself a little world wise. I've been to France with their holes in the floor and I've sat on a pile of bricks in Zambia. But the first time I used a Thai toilet, I was terrified! Now it looks like a normal toilet, it's only when you've finished what you came for that the panic sets in. There's no toilet roll. What's more, there's no toilet roll holder even. It suddenly becomes clear that Thailand is one of those countries where, when they first built their sewer system, they employed pretty stupid plumbers. The result is that bog roll would clog the pipes. Therefore there is only way to clean yourself up, I think the best way to describe it would be a bathroom-sized car jet wash. Believe me now, nothing will ever compare to the horror that you feel when you first work this out! (Oh and before anyone gets the wrong idea I'm not going round taking photos of toilets! You an find a picture of anything on the internet!)

Tomorrow we're off to Halong Bay. We're getting a bus over and then spending an afternoon, evening and night on a traditional junk boat. Next morning we're going sea kyaking round caves, sunbathing and doing some swimming in the crystal blue sea. Of course, since we've booked this through our dodgy hotel it could end up as going there in the back of a van, spending an afternoon, evening and night on a piece of junk and paddling over to the caves on a wooden raft. Whichever it is, it will be an experience!

Fit Men and Freaky "Girls"

I'd better get this out of the way first. Today I saw some very fit men.

No, I haven't turned into a Sebastian and no, the famous Bangkok "girls" are not remotely attractive. I went to watch some Thai boxers training this afternoon, and bloody hell were they fit! The speed on their punches and kicks was incredible. It was a little gym in the back of some alley in the middle of nowehere. They just let us in to watch ringside, pretty interesting actually.

As to the "freaky girls". They are EVERYWHERE. Go into a bar or restaurant and the chances are that you'll be served by an "it" and not a "he" or a "she". What makes that worse is that there are different Thai words for "Thanks" depending on whether you're talking to a man or woman. So when I get served by a half and half I have absolutely no idea what's the right "Thanks" to say. I've ended up either mumbling incoherently or just saying "Diolch" instead!
The good point is that it's pretty damn simple to spot them. The chances of making a mistake are very small, even when very drunk. In fact I'm pretty sure one of them had a bloody beard!

We got a good chance to learn the difference when we got into an argument with three of them, one normal waitress and four bouncers last night. The problem came from the fact that over here you're served your drink in a bar and you don't just pay. They put a reciept in a glass on your table, and at the end of the night you pay for all the reciepts. After 6 jugs the idea of "forgetting" about one the reciepts sounded like a superb plan. And we got away with it (saving the massive sum of 2 quid!). Problem is that an hour later we went back to the same bloody bar (don't ask me why, especially when there are about 20 bars on that street!) and got remembered. We did the honourable thing and denied everything, lying through our teeth. The ladyboy who had served us before went into a proper strop and the bouncers came over for a chat. I don't think it will suprise you that we paid up pretty quick (while still claiming total ignorance and denying everything!).

Only other thing I've done today is go see the National Museum (I know, how cultured am I!) and bought a very crappy fake watch for about 2 pounds. I'm so used to having a mobile I totally forgot about bringing a watch!

I'm on my own now, the two Englishmen left about an hour ago and Carwyn, my flatmate, who was supposed to meet me yesterday didn't turn up. Fair play to him though he had a prety good reason. He got drunk and missed his bus! As long as he stays sober tonight we should be fine though, tomorrow evening I'm leaving Bangkok (thank God, I've had enough of being offered taxis, Tuk Tuks, cheap lighters, massages and ping pong girls every 20 seconds!) and heading for Vietnam! No plush Etihad Airlines this time though, we're going with Air Asia. From what I understand they're the EasyJet of Asia, let's just say that I'm not very optimistic!

Bangkok - The City of Scams

A trio of herb red Capsian and saffron crepes filled with plain, Arabic and Indian style scrambled eggs served with sauteed mushrooms and a tomato cup filled with baked beans.

or

Triangles of honeycombed waffles topped with berries and poached apple waffles.

No, not the Cardiff Hilton, or the stingy Jury's either, but a selection from the menu (yes, you heard me, menu!) on the airplane over. What's more they gave me proper cutlery to eat it with. Granted the food still came in cheap tinfoil and tasted like cardboard, but proper silver (well, stainless steel then) cutlery. Talk about class! I also had a personal telly, video games and 35 films to choose from. They even had some Only Fools and Horses! Once we were in the air the hostesses became waitresses, serving us with whatever drink we ordered for free (no Tequila Rose though, amateurs!). And to think that I only flied with them because they were cheaper than airlines I'd actually heard of! All I was expecting was to get from Manchester to Bangkok, via Abu Dhabi, in one piece. I didn't expect service!

My only little complaint about Etihad Airlines is that, even though both planes were pretty full, they put me in an empty row twice. Now I know I'm not the smallest guy, and I wasn't complaining about being able to stretch out across more than one seats, but surely giving me four seats to myself, twice, is taking the piss! Especially since I was desperate to talk to someone so that I could latch on to them and hope they knew what they were gonna do once we got to Bangkok, because I for one had no idea. In the end I managed to strike a conversation with two boys from Leeds on the bus. One of them calls me Peter by mistake. He knows he's wrong and I know he's wrong, but neither of us noticed until about 4 hours in and by then it was too late. It would be too embarassing for me to correct him or him to ask for my name again, so I'm Peter for the rest of today! We found a hotle, well I call it a hotel, it's got nice beds and a shower, but to get to it we had to jump over some puddles of raw sewrage and cats so skinny you could nearly see through them!

Today we took a Tuk Tuk round Bangkok. For the uneducated among you, this is a Tuk Tuk

Not the most comfortable ride, especially with three squashed in the back! What's more, tuk tuk drivers have no recognition of the idea of "lanes" and like to dodge queues by finding small gaps between lorries! At one time we were even going horizontal across the road, dodghing traffic coming across us!

They tried to take us for one long con. After some scavengers tried to force us to give them money some nice local "student" and his very hot girlfriend came over to ask if we got away ok. He asked us where we were headed and told us that we couldn't go there (the Palace) in our sandals. He suggested a lot of sights to go see instead, the nice man even drew us map. He suggested we find a Tuk Tuk driver to take us round them and, just as if God had plucked him from the heavens, a driver appeared. We should have realised that it was one of the notorious Bangkok scams but, due to the very hot girlfriend, our minds were elswehere!

At one of the sights the driver went away to the toilets. Just then a nice friendly tourist from North Thailand came for a chat, asking where we were headed. When he saw our map he was delighted! He'd been to our next destination that very morning, there was a nice tailor there who was celebrating the King's birthday with a massive sale. He'd bought 6 for himself and two for his mother! The only thing is no one was supposed to know about it since it was a local's secret. But, being the nice man he was, he thought he'd let us know!

So basically we ended up in a tailors looking at very cheap, crap fabrics, pretending to have an interest because we didn't want the Tuk Tuk man to drive off, leaving us in the middle of Bangkok! The tailor even managed a friendly "Iechyd Da" when he found out I was Welsh! We basically acted around for twenty minutes, pretending to be interested in the most horrid colours and jackets we could find. Then we promised we'd come back later. Our nice Tuk Tuk man, who was being paid comission to take us to the place but didn't really care if we actually bought anything, then took us home. The great thing is that the Tuk Tuk man was happy, he had his commission, and we were very happy. We'd seen a lot of Bangkok, had a very entertaining 3 hours fearing for our lives on the streets, and all we had to pay the guy in the end was 25p each!

Ball Photos

Bore da! Hope everyone's feeling the effects of last night. If I have to get up, pack, clean and drive home then the least you can do is suffer a little headache and dodgy tummy!

Pretty impressed with myself that I managed to write all that last night, although I've had to correct tens of mistypes this morning.

I've managed to put most of last night's photos online. Unfortunately, since I'm a tight ass and would never pay someone just to show my pictures, I had to split them between two pages.

The first 30 photos are here...............
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42748903@N00/

And then there's a few more here...................
http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?Uc=imb2lwy.192qo6b6&Uy=-mis7af&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&mode=fromshare&conn_speed=1
(now that's a long link!)

BTW, for some reason you've got to press "refresh" to see new posts on this thing, otherwise it looks exactly like it was the last time you looked at it (or maybe that's just my computer!)

Let's See How This Works Then!

Good Evening!
Right, it's 3:54am and I've just got home from the Ball. Someone told me tonight (no idea who, night is pretty much a blur) that it would be easier to write a blog than send everyone an e-mail when I'm abroad. So I'm giving it a try right now.

I'm not 100% sure how this blog thing works, let's see if I can put a good Ball picture in..........

If that worked then there will be a picture to the right (over here ------------>) of me and a lot of lucious lovelies, otherwise known as the Group 1 girls. (BTW, the bloke on the right is neither me, a lucious lovely nor a Group 1 girl, that's Jen's man)

Firstly, I'm bloody pissed off. I lost my bow tie somewhere in Chippy Lane and the bastards at the hire place are guaranteed to over-charge me when I bring the tux back on Monday (although since I'll be half way to Abu Dhabi by then, Vik will have to take the brunt of their anger!)

Secondly (there must be a "secondly" after a "firstly", or at least that's what Pat told us) I'm on a bit of a downer seeing as how I'm not going to see the vast majority of LPC people again, and even those who I will see (which are probably the same people who may bother to read this) I won't see for a couple of months. I'm not even round for results, I'll be somewhere in southern Thailand by then!

I'll see if I'm able to put a lot of tonight's pictures up here, that would save me having to attatch them to e-mails for everyone who asked tonight. There's 71 in total though, so I might just not bother!

Finally, since it's the end of our 10 months (or 4 years as is the case for some of us) in Cardiff, here's a sorry reminder of what horror some of you (including me!) will have to face sometime in the next few days....................


I know, horrible isn't it! Go Ecuador! ;-)