For the last two-and-a-half weeks we’ve had our good friend Jiin Wei staying with us from Melbourne. And we’ve had such a great time!! Lots and lots of adventures and laughs.
One weekend we made a trip to Bangkok’s Chinatown, which unlike any Chinatowns I’ve experienced before it really was like being in a different country! Took a river taxi (boat) and then visited a flower and fresh fruit market on the way,
fought our way through crowds in markets, ate plenty of tasty street-food snacks and then finally found ourselves a beer at a very strange bar.
Finished off with dinner at a very “rustic” restaurant! Later that night we went for cocktails & jazz at the Sheraton… a very dignified way to finish a very hectic day!
I (Pete) had to work during the week but Paul and Jiin managed to have plenty of adventures so they didn’t miss me too much! One day, a trip to the spectacular Grand Palace:
Another day, Thai cooking classes at the famous Blue Elephant restaurant.
Since Paul and I have been living in Bangkok we’d been hearing about the oh-so-glam Bed Supperclub… we saved the first visit up until Jiin Wei was in town to join us! Fantastic food, amazing venue, great volumes of cocktails, sooo chic. I honestly felt like we had walked into a James Bond movie. Too cool.
Just in case we hadn’t been having enough fun already, the Queen’s Birthday long weekend came up so we took advantage of the occasion to head down to Koh Samui for a bit of a break. Things did not start well when the normally-40 minute trip to the airport took over 3 hours due to the pre-holiday traffic jam. Luckily we’d allowed way too much time for the trip but still had to run to catch the plane! Very stressful I must say - fortunately the only thing that went wrong for the whole weekend, so we were lucky there.
We were staying at the oddly-named Big John resort, a cheap-and-cheerful place right on the beach. An old friend of Jiin Wei’s, Ed, had been travelling in Thailand at the time also and joined us for the weekend.
It turned out that on our second night at the resort a couple was getting married right there on the beach. Well after a few drinks and when they’d all finished up for the night we couldn’t help but take advantage of their setup:
I think all that tropical air must have been going to our heads……
When we finally made it back to Bangkok there was only a day or so left before both Jiin and Ed had to go home… on the last night we celebrated Jiin’s 30th birthday a couple of days early at the fantastic roof-top Vertigo restaurant - outdoors with a bird’s eye view over Bangkok. Spectacular and with food to match. Finished up with drinkies at another rooftop venue, the spectacular Sky Bar. (Any of you who read this and come to visit, we promise to take you too! It’s awesome.) It was a great way to finish up what had been a great couple of weeks.
Thanks for coming to visit us Jiin, we had a ball! Glad to know that you did too. Come back soon!
xoxoxoxoxo
So no sooner had we moved in to our new apartment, it was time to go off on holidays for two weeks! Not actually a bad thing after the stress of the last few months, and the fact that it would be another two weeks before our shipment of household stuff arrived from Australia. The apartment didn’t really have much in it!
Our good friends Alice and Steve were getting married and people have travelled from all over the world for the wedding in Phuket. How convenient that we’d just moved to Thailand!! But before heading there, we went to Koh Lanta for a “pre wedding-holiday holiday” with a smaller number of people.
So we flew into Krabi airport and two hours and two car ferries later we arrived at Rawi Waren resort - brand new, top notch and completely devoid of any guests apart from ourselves! Fantastic, there’s nothing like having your own private resort. Of course the place soon got nicknamed Rabbit Waren since the proper name is too much of a tongue-twister.
The resort was beautiful of course, except for some reason they decided that a “Tom Yum Martini” would be a good thing. I thought it would be a good thing too, until I tried one. If you ever have the opportunity, don’t.
Basically spent the next few days there hanging around the pool, a well earned break.
The only bad thing which happened was an impromptu, and unwelcome, “caving” adventure. We’d hired motorbikes and were buzzing around the island, as you do, and decided to visit a famous local cave. We imagined this would be a case of ride motorbike to carpark, get off and look at cave for a while, get back on bike 5 minutes later. Well, after a 20 minute vertical hike through jungle to get to the entrance of the cave we were stuffed already, and still hadn’t seen any cave. Wondering if this is a good idea? We’d been issued with torches, which hung around our necks, and were shown how to turn them on - twist these two wires together. Great.
The important part of this story is that we’re still alive, although we wondered about that at the time. Two hours in the dark squeezing through muddy gaps in rocks, slipping down rickety bamboo ladders and having very, very close brushes with
claustrophobic panic. 
The worst thing is there wasn’t even anything good to see when we were in there! A little stalactite or something would have been nice but these were the blandest caves known to man.
Never mind though, the rest of our stay on Koh Lanta was wonderful. A day or so later we went off on a 4-island cruise on a boat we’d chartered, which was a great day. We went snorkeling, swam into a magnificent cave (in sharp contrast to the earlier one!) and had lunch on a beach. Even the boat ride itself was great, cruising along on the flat-as-a-tack Andaman Sea, watching the islands go by and thinking, “This is the life.”
OK so I’m jumping ahead in the chronology of the story here a bit, but I’ve made a page with some photos of the apartment - taken after our stuff had arrived from Aus.
So comfortably set up in our little temporary apartment, we were ready to start rebuilding our lives! Almost that is, Pete had to start work again the very next morning since the whole project was at that stage lurching from one emergency to another. Which was a nuisance at the time, but in retrospect, it meant that I got paid for two weeks of work I hadn’t planned on doing, which turned out to be very welcome a few weeks later!!
This meant of course that a lot of the house-hunting work had to be done by Paul; we researched places on the internet together and he met with the agent who showed him the properties and drove him around. After only seeing half a dozen… “Pete can we increase the budget a little bit?” To cut a long story short the place he’d found was fantastic, and great value for the money too, and that’s where we live now.
During this time too we had to start getting towels, sheets, all the stuff we hadn’t brought from home. Made more complicated by the fact that we had to wait until the 1st of June before we could move in - so our little serviced apartment began to look like a miniature department store - the boxes with the new iron, rice cooker, toaster etc piled in one spot, the new towels in another, a mountain of pillows… we didn’t even want to think about how we were going to transport it all to the new place when the time came.
The time finally did come, Thursday the 1st of June! Moving in, even though we had only minimal “stuff”, not surprisingly gave us a sense of security and certainty as well as a decent kitchen to start cooking in! Pity we didn’t have any cookware yet but Paul made short work of that problem… gee he hates buying kitchen equipment! The bulk of our stuff would be arriving by ship in a couple of weeks’ time.
No mucking around, we had our first house guests only one day later… Jono and Rod, friends ex-Melbourne, Sydney and currently Barcelona, just flown in from Europe. It was great to see them and have our first visitors despite being ill-prepared. Dinner at a Vertigo, a fantastic roof-top restaurant (where we didn’t get rained on, miraculously) and a relatively early night, for tomorrow we’re all off on holidays… stay tuned!