Tuesday 15th June 2010

With much relief, Thailand - for the time being - has just about returned to normal. Whether the problems will return or not remains to be seen. The underlying causes of the riots in Bangkok remain pretty much as they were, and therefore I suspect that the political situation in Thailand will continue to be volatile.

These are turbulent times for the world at large, and my own personal situation in Thailand has changed immensely in the last three years. I receive a full-time Thai salary but as the bulk of my income comes from the UK (and will continue to do so), my spending power has been hit incredibly hard due to the financial crises and ever-plummeting exchange rate.

I have decided not to continue this blog. The technology we all have at our disposal these days is incredible, but for some time the direction in which it has been going has concerned me.

Going back to the beginning of MTV, and then YouTube, the world seems obsessed now with 15 second bites of entertainment and information. As a result, attention spans have decreased, and now it seems impossible for a lot of people to take in any information any longer than a quick video clip or a 140 character Twitter message.

Such is the world we live in. The demand seems to be for frequent, short pieces of information that are simple to understand and easily digestible. This isn't what I'm comfortable with and during the time I was writing this blog it often felt as if I had made a rod for my own back.

Since I stopped making updates here I have been updating other parts of this site. I started writing about Thailand too soon, without really understanding certain things, and lots of things I wrote previously need to be rewritten.

Also, due to some work I started last year with photos, a lot of photos went missing causing broken links. I've been fixing these while, at the same time, making the photos bigger. It's a lot of work and very time-consuming but hopefully it should improve the site.

I'm happier doing this sort of thing rather than blogging. I was never really cut out for blogging, and besides, I don't have the time. The rest of my life is very full.

Apart from some web site updates, which remain fairly unimportant to me, my current plan is to stop teaching as soon as possible and then to pursue my own interests in Thailand. I have lots of ideas of the things I want to do but I need a couple of key things to happen first before I can do this without ever having to worry about working again.

Hopefully, these things will happen fairly soon, within a year or so.

While this blog was active there were a number of regular followers. I don't know your names because no one ever wrote, but the same IP address details kept popping up in my site statistics.

Thanks for taking an interest and good luck with whatever goals you are pursuing in life. I got the impression that people reading this blog were mainly those living in the West who were considering making a move to Thailand.

Stick to your goals and keep making new ones because without targets to aim at in life, our lives can start to lack meaning and direction.

Thailand isn't perfect but it's still a good place to live, provided that the type of lifestyle available in Thailand is one that suits you. The lifestyle won't suit everyone.

My aim with the rest of this site is to eventually turn it into a useful resource for people unfamiliar with Thailand so that they can get a feel (through words and photos) of what it's like for a foreigner to live in the country.

It's a slow process, though, and to get the site how I want it will probably take until the rest of the year, if not longer. There's a lot at the moment that I'm not happy with and I don't have much free time to spend messing around with computers.

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