Phuket 01/10/2008

"Last night two men tried to steal our restaurant!"
We actually received an email with this subject line last week.
http://www.baanrimpa.com/hungfats/restaurant/gallery.html
This is the restaurant these hapless criminals were attempting to abscond with. Yes, yes the would be burglars were actually trying to rob said establishment, but the story is no-where near as funny when you hear it that way. Luckily the men were apprehended by the security guards and it turned out one of them was employed by the company who had been employed the previous month to set up the sound system in the restaurant... Such is the way of things in Thailand.

Thailand is still full of funny moments, I think I'm going to have a blueberry day but it turns out I'm having a prune day! You think your buying blueberry drinking yoghurt at the 7-11 and get outside to discover you have actually bought the prune flavor, hell they use the same colour packaging and both have all the writing in Thai, sigh, and move on while slurping your pruney beverage.

I often wish I carry my camera with me, as there are always those moments when you wish you had it, but still I never get around to carrying it i'm just not a bag carrier or it's always just that one extra thing that never makes it in anyway. We were at lunch the other day and parked outside of the restaurant was a mitsubishi so old the thing was held together by rust and an enormous coke sticker covering the entire bonnet (I'm guessing as an attempt to keep the engine dry in areas where the rust has eaten through the bonnet. The owner once so proud had gone to the effort of cutting out the letters to spell the name of his beloved car brand and stick them across the front of his car, Carefully he formed these foreign shapes out of the sticky material but apparently never once bothering to go to the rear of the car where Mitsubishi is emblazoned across the bumper, the front of his car proudly declares itself a "MUSTIFUSHI" .


For those of you who aren't sad tragic facebook addicts let me bring you up to speed on Pippi's adventures overseas.

Being an expatriot means living a life of unexpected jobs, and parties on luxury yachts, last weekend, we went to the "infinity yacht party" A youngish German guy who brings his yacht to Phuket every year had an onboard party, there were psychedelic neon sheets hung as decorations, there was a blonde dreadlocked guy spinning the discs, there was dancing and little dingys ferrying party goers to the dock and back. And then their is my current job, one does not get employed according to their qualifications or even suitability for a job, one gets employed because their is a limited number of English speakers and a transient community dropping through, so it's always the best person to do the job at the time it's available who gets the job. having said that working for the Phuket Has Been Good To Us Foundation has been great, it's been a really rewarding experience to work for a charity, and it's been interesting to have a taste of an office job, being so sedentary really makes me understand for the first time in my life why it is people go to the gym. It's also been interesting to have debates about the idea of essential self and whether gender is a social construct with your boss over the mornings emails. We have been heavily involved in finding two teachers for our schools, I am amazed at the standard of most people's c.v's, riddled with spelling errors (guys your applying for a job as an English teacher!) it becomes immediately apparent why these people are looking for work.

So I am currently doing my dive master which absorbs a tremendous amount of time, there is physics and physiology to learn and I also have to reach a whole new level of fitness to pass the practical tests, this goes some way to making up for my sedentary job, but again consumes huge amounts of time, walking up and down those stairs I appreciate what my Mum did before she climbed in the Himalayas a little more..

My friend Jaime has taken up learning to sail so I now spend lots of time at the yaught club (though I'm still not confident on the spelling). It's nice just to hang out and see a different beach, the beach at Pan wah is beautiful and sheltered, great for swimming, with a great big pearl farm slap dab in the middle, the whole area around the beach is owned by one old Thai guy, who in typical Thai fashion still collects all the plastic bottles and cans that accumulate at the club so he can collect the 3 or 4 baht he will get back for each one. Uncle scrooge's soul lives on.

Thai politics, a revolving door of charlatans and pilferers has got rid of the last Prime minister (who prior to his role as PM was a t.v. celebrity chef). by claiming that his appearance on a t.v. cooking show recently was a conflict of interest (or something). the new Prime minister in the true fashion we have come to expect is not a Thaksin crony but ... (wait for it now)... Thaksin's brother in law, on goes the farce, the protesting has at least stopped (for now) the airport is open and business as usual goes on

My friend Evie was here recently with her now husband Benno, they were staying in the Phuket laguna complex, I had never been there before, what a rabbit warren of ticky tacky hotels and houses, it's legoland for tourists. I spent half an hour riding aimlessly around on my bike looking for the particular hotel they were staying in. It is lovely though to ride the boat around the laguna too and from the various hotels and the beach front. I was telling Eve about the tuk tuk mafia, she wanted to know how they could be evil when they have such a cute name, a rose by any other name?

On my bike driving to work in the morning over the (at the best of times) perilous hill into Phuket, traffic had come to a sudden stop, i snacked my way through the backed up traffic to discover a huge parade at the head, oh yes, It is again time for the vegetarian festival, religious frenzy resulting in self mutilation of various kinds, the flinging of fireworks with gay abandon, the possesion of ordinary Phuket citizens by the Chinese ancestor gods, I'll try to remember my camera next time.

I currently live in beautiful Kamala, it's three minutes from the beach, I go down nightly to watch the sunset and play poi, the ride over the hills here from Patong is easily along some of the most beautiful winding roads. it's a fantastic way to start and finish your day.

The weekend before last we did a clean up scuba day, Dive shops all over the world had a day when they took out there boats and everybody gave their time for free and we went diving and pulled rubbish off the reef's. Here in Phuket we went to a local dive site, the whole thing was covered in a massive fishing net, it was really difficult, We were fighting the current at 5-7 meters trying to stay in place and delicately remove the net, I fear coral gets broken this way, As time ran out and meters of this net still lay all around us I gave up trying to remove it and just took to slashing the thing open so the fish at least could get in and out. There is still a lot more that needs to be done to cleanup our oceans! We need more than one day a year.

South America becons.