Nothing beats a good feed, and I have just had a good feed. Fresh egg noodles with Chinese roast red pork, crispy pork and fresh wantons, barbequed pork neck and some barbequed sweetcorn with butter and coconut milk sauce for dessert. As every Thai person ever would say “aroi maak”.

My good friend in Seoul, Rachel Lynn gave me a shameless plug on her website to increase my traffic. So as a result, I have to give her a big shout out. And also draw attention to one of the more photogenic moments of my life.

My parents have returned safely to the motherland, sunny old England and I’m stuck here in boring, grey Thailand – or have I made a mistake there? Anyway, we had a great time in Hua Hin, a place I would say is probably the Thai equivalent of Cleethorpes or Bridlington in England. The hotel we stayed in looked fantastic; the atmosphere was so relaxed, it felt like everybody was about a second away from sleep. Also I came back a little bit less white than I was when I went there, which is nice. Somebody even told me I looked tanned today - but only after I told her I’d been on holiday.

The best thing we did was visit the monastery/monkey colonies on Chopstick Mountain (Khao Takiap). Everything I read about Hua Hin called this place a mountain, but in reality it’s little more than a slightly oversized speed bump. The monkeys were amazing though. I love monkeys anyway, they’re just like children but with more hair. It was the first time I’ve ever seen them face to face, instead of them in a cage or me in a car.

There were three colonies on the mountain, the one at the top was the biggest and most like drunken English people – always fighting and making lots of noise. It was whilst feeding these monkeys that provided one of the best moments of the holiday. The person wearing a monkey hat in the next photo is my mum. At the time, she was holding a box of bananas and this guy just jumped on her head and tried to steal them. She was shitting herself and all my step-dad Mick and I could do is piss ourselves laughing and take photos - funny even tho I couldn’t get a good pic of her horrified face.

Another cool thing about the holiday was the number of jellyfish that were washed up on the beach. Now, usually I’m a bit of an animal lover and would hate to see animals dehydrating and dying on the beach like that. I’m not sure why, but I just couldn’t get my heart around to thinking about helping the jellyfish though. When you think about it though, what the fuck is a jellyfish? I mean it’s just a cheap childrens’ dessert with tentacles. I can see the point of jelly, I can see the point of fish, but jellyfish just baffle me. They look minging and are very dangerous. These ones were big too. Mina claimed that they couldn’t sting because they don’t have tentacles, but I’m pretty sure that the one on the left hasn’t got fingers, and they certainly aren’t translucent cigars.

I’m not sure if this guy made it back into the sea or not, or if he ended up doomed like his cousins, but it was quite fun to watch him flap his little jellyfish fronds about everytime a wave crashed in.

Other than that, nothing else much happened last week. I sat on a beach, I sat by a pool, I drank and I ate - a LOT. There was no reason to wait this long to update either, but I can be a bit lazy from time to time. Look at the pretty flowers.

The season’s changing, so hopefully after this week there won’t be any floods in Bangkok. This is good news. The only problem is that every time the seasons change in Asia, I seem to get sick. I had a class yesterday and most of the students were sick and now today I seem to have it too. Right now I’m sat in bed feeling rubbish. I made it to my Thai class though. Mina suggested I go for a foot massage afterwards, so I did. I went to the Bangkok night market because it’s next to the subway station near my school. I felt quite a lot better afterwards, but I’m back at home feeling sorry for myself now. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better tomorrow though coz I’m off to Hua Hin on holiday - exciting.

I did manage to take a couple of pictures at the night market though. There’s one of a bunch of bamboo puppet men/water wheel/water feature/it really would be easier if you just came to look at it type thing.

Also there’s a picture of what is supposedly the world’s largest transportable big wheel, La Roue De Paris, behind a replica of part of the massive Angkor Wat temple city in Cambodia. Strangely enough, La Roue De Paris was in Birmingham when I was in my final year of university there.

I found this thing on Shelly in Korea’s blog. You can do it yourself here.

According to this then, it’s theoretically possible to be andy thailandy; somebody whose endless laughter could signify your death.

Forgive me Blogfather for I have sinned; many revolutions of the earth have passed since my last update. In my defence though, my parents are in town and instead of typing stuff for the whole world to read on the internet, I’ve been letting them take me out for expensive meals. In the last few days, I’ve eaten, drank and seen a show and that’s about it (there was a little bit of work in there too somewhere).

The show we went to see was great, a Thai culture show that was all cultural and stuff. Unfortunately cameras were banned inside the actualy show, so you’ll just have to come to Thailand and go and watch it if you want to know what it looks like. Luckily we could take photos outside the show, and there was a lot going on out there too.

The funniest of these things was a guy who was sitting painting when we met him. He had loads of hand made buffalo leather shadow puppets on a wall beside him (you can see two big ones on the wall behind him, but most of the smaller ones were on the right hand side). He couldn’t really speak English, so my incredibly useful girlfriend Mina had to translate for us. Then he gave us an little demonstration with some of the puppets, only the puppet could speak and make jokes in English. Weird!

I believe these guys were the inspiration for an Abba song.

An elephant made from traditional Thai fairy lights with what I think are dancing viruses.

Also, carrying on with the ethnic instruments theme that my friend from uni Metul started when he bought me a didgeridoo, I bought a set of traritional bamboo pipes, similar to the ones this guy is playing. They come from the northeast of Thailand (just like a few of my favourite Thai foods) and are incredibly difficult to play. You often see old men from that region playing them on the streets of Bangkok, busking for a few baht. They are usually fantastic and I love to listen to them. Also note the virus mask behind him (it’s actually used to scare off bad spirits).

Bangkok is doing a very good impression of Bangladesh at the moment. Torrential rain over the last few days means that certain parts of the city are under water at the moment. At the moment, the area I live in is pretty ok. My road was flooded just over ankle deep for a few hours the other day, but that’s it. Where I’ve been working recently is another matter entirely though. Sorry about the quality of the pic, but I took it from the bus on the way home (as for the angle, I’m not too sure, maybe I was drunk). If you look hard enough you will see that there’s a white minibus, at the top right hand corner, with flood water over halfway up the wheels, and below it some kind of unidentified red thing that’s almost completely submerged.

I took the next photo on my way to work yesterday; it’s the canal closest to my apartment. As you can see, the water level is mere centimetres below the bank, usually it’s at least a metre below. By all accounts still in for some more rain over the next few days and weeks. I showed this picture to one of my students last night and he said, while laughing “Tomorrow their houses will be flooded.” Nice guy though really.

In non water related news, I saw a young elephant at the top of my street yesterday. Now, the relationship between Thai people and elephants is far too baffling for me to understand. Most Thais, rightly so, love elephants. They’re a royal animal, white elephants especially so (a white elephant actually featured on an early version of the Thai flag), they’ve also been very useful to the country throughout history in a variety of ways, and they look bad ass. So what do you see on the streets of Bangkok almost every night? Bastards (and I mean bastards!) walking around with elephants trying to get people to buy bags of food to feed them. I don’t claim to be an expert in elephant physiology, but I don’t think that their soft feet were designed to walk for hours on concrete! I also have trouble believing that their natural diet includes sacks full of half mouldy bananas.

Ok, off my soap box now, and on a much happier note some of my students took me out for dinner last night. We went to a little steak house near to the office and spent a lot of time just chatting. If I still lived in Korea, there is no doubt that an occasion like that would have called for copious amounts of something highly intoxicating, like soju. Instead I live n Thailand, so I had a lime juice. Almost as exciting, but somehow not quite.

So it seems like Kim Jong Il has jumped off the deep end and pissed a lot of people off. Apparantry he’s been feering especiarry ronery recentry. Why couldn’t George Bush just have given him that hug when he asked for it? Anyway, a nucular North Korea is not good news for anybody. The Japanese must be wondering what kind of nuclear god they’ve pissed off though.

So to all my friends in South Korea, we’re thinking about you all. Hope you are safe and well. Stay out of trouble, keep well, fight-eu! And remember to sing “Dae Han Min Guk” (followed rhythmical bashing of the inflatable red sticks from the football - you know the ones I mean). If it all goes wrong don’t forget to eat a lot of kimchi, I seem to remember one ajumma telling me that kimchi protects against the ravages of nuclear winter*.

*this may or may not come from the same school of thought as fan death.

So England drew with Macedonia last night and Scotland beat France. Very sad news indeed. Still, both Wales and Ireland got stuffed, so at least there’s a comedy element to the sadness.

I was on the internet the other day trying to think of a good name for my fledgling blog when some bald bloke from Swaziland suggested andythompsonisabadmelv.wordpress.com. Funnily enough I wasn’t particularly impressed with this, but his next suggestion was pure gold. Thailandy – wonderousness. So, I feel I have to publicly declare that Swaz James is a genius. Even if I move to another country, I can adapt my new moniker and it still works: Englandy, Scotlandy, Finlandy, Australiandy, Boliviandy, Japandy, Americandy, Papuandy New Guinea, and so on. The way I figure, the only countries I can’t move to now are Brazil and East Timor.

In other news, it’s almost the end of the weekend. Enjoy the rest of it. I will, I’m off to do some shopping and then to watch a movie. Here’s a picture of the CBD of Bangkok at dusk and a sign you can see on the subway here (happy Mina??).

So anyway…

…I moved away from sunny England almost two years ago and thought it’s about time I started writing some of the things I’ve experienced down, otherwise I might forget. So, in no particular order, a brief summary of the last two years of my life.

I’ve: fallen in love,
travelled to nine different countries,
flown in ten aeroplanes,
been on two cruises,
been through a military coup,
met loads of new people,
lost a lot of weight,
suffered temperatures ranging between -17 and +40 degrees C,
watched my mum get married by the beach,
experienced three rainy seasons,
been through two typhoons,
taught children,
taught adults,
worked in one of the shittyest language schools on Korea,
worked in a good language school in Korea,
worked in some of the top hotels in Bangkok,
hidden from a drunken mob in a Seoul karaoke bar,
been to the birthday party of a famous Thai singer,
laughed at several drunken Thai celebrities,
bought a Brasil shirt from a Brasilian lady, in Korea,
ridden an elephant,
had a serious allergic reaction to tuna,
climbed two waterfalls,
waded through flood waters on the way home from work,
been to a rum museum,
drank a cocktail called “Liquid Viagra”
watched a guy climb a palm tree, pick a coconut and then make a cocktail with it,
broken three bamboo canes on students’ hands (little bastards!),
watched cocktail shows by some of the best bartenders in Asia,
rediscovered Chupa Chups cola,
been to a a death museum,
been to a death railway,
been to an outdoor concert of the Korean version of Cliff Richards,
laughed at a friend singing along with the Korean Cliff Richards,
been given a didgeridoo,
tried to learn the didgeridoo,
failed miserably - but still trying,
experienced the biggest, craziest water fight ever,
visited many temples,
found that Seoul has some of the best bars ever,
found that Seoul has some of the worst beers ever,
eaten some wonderful food,
eaten some awful “food” (fermented sausage anyone?),
managed to avoid eating grasshopper, dog, cockroach, bamboo worm, boiled and fried silk worm, scorpion and frog (I am quite tempted by scorpion though!),
there’s bound to be more and there’s all the usual day-to-day stuff like soju, street food, tropical shit, street food, drinking and street food.  Sawasdee.