Living In Thailand Blog
Friday 13th December 2013
My wife had another doctor's appointment for her pregnancy yesterday and told the doctor that she wants the baby delivered six days agead of the estimated delivery date, which is on a Thursday. She had previously told me that the baby must be born on a Tuesday or Friday, and she favours Friday.
She told me that if he is born on a Friday he will have a good relationship with me and won't fight with his elder sister. She is deathly serious about this. Thai obstetricians are very familiar with this type of thing and our doctor just agreed.
Thais are extremely superstitious, however, ladders and today's date don't mean anything to them. Humans are very strange creatures.
Now that she has decided on the date of birth, the next priority will be to select an auspicious 'real name'. This is a very complex process and she will consult friends, relatives, fortune tellers, books, and Internet sites that specialise in this type of thing. There is no role for me in this matter.
On the other hand, I am expected to provide a suitable nickname - a task that isn't proving to be at all easy. I can think of many girls' names that I like, but thinking of a boy's name is difficult. So far I have only come up with two suggestions and she doesn't like them. Likewise, I haven't liked any of her suggestions so far. We still have time.
One doctor told us he is 99% sure the child will be a boy, and another doctor was 100% sure. I hope they are right because we have given away our daughter's newborn clothes and bought clothes for a boy.
Newborn babies grow out of clothes so quickly that their old clothes are still virtually new. It seems a shame just to throw them away. I asked my wife if there are any charity shops here to which we can donate clothes. I should also add that baby clothes can also be quite expensive. She told me no.
There are lots of poor people in Thailand who I assume would appreciate good quality used baby clothes and my old hometown in England had several such shops in the highstreet. Why is there nothing like this in Thailand?
The external paint on our house wasn't applied well and after just a year of living here I had to pay someone last month to repaint the bottom half of the house. The painter I got in was the same Burmese man that has helped me out before with various jobs.
We found out that his wife is here and that they have a young baby, therefore, we gave them a bag of clothes. A neighbour has also just given birth and we gave her some clothes as well. Both seemed quite grateful, especially the Burmese couple because they have quite a hard life.
I donated old clothes to charity shops in the UK because the shops helped me to get rid of things I no longer wanted and, at the same time, my donation would hopefully help someone who was less fortunate. I knew that I wouldn't be able to sell the clothes and maybe it was a good thing for my karma account.
Making merit and increasing their karma account is of the utmost importance to Thais, but the way they normally do it is via the sangha (community of Buddhist monks) by going to a temple or by giving alms.
Personally, I have never been keen on this and on some occasions when I have gone to the temple with a Thai to make merit I have found the monks to be quite arrogant. I prefer to give directly to people who really need help, but this is not how Thais see it.
Another thing that surprises me in Thailand is the junk for sale in Thai second-hand shops. It really is junk - the kind of stuff that I just throw in the trash. Many Thais are so in love with the material world that they can't seem to accept that there comes a time when material things cease to have a value.
I'm sure this is what kept the price of used cars in Thailand so high for so long before a sudden dose of reality brought the used car market crashing down earlier this year.
This could be another reason why Thais won't give away clothes in reasonable condition because they believe there is still value.
Tuesday 10th December 2013
Today is a national holiday in Thailand. It is Constitution Day, an irony that is probably lost on most Thais.
This is the timetable from a kindergarten I stumbled upon. The translation is mine, and thus any mistakes are also mine.
08:00-08:30 Meet individual children
08:30-08:45 Pay respect to national flag
08:45-09:00 Health check in bathroom
09:00-09:20 Movement and rhythm exercise
09:20-09:40 Break, drink milk
09:40-10:30 Activity to enhance experience, games
10:30-11:00 Creative activity free choice
11:00-11:30 Lunch break
11:30-12:00 Brush teeth
12:00-14:00 Sleep break
14:00-14:10 Wake up, pack up mattress, wash face
14:10-14:30 Break
14:30-15:00 Outdoor activity (unspecified)
15:00-15:00 Go home
What do you think?
I like the exercise activities and the basic hygiene stuff (even though 30 minutes for teeth cleaning seems a bit excessive), but what strikes me is a complete lack of any academic activities where kids actually learn something. There is also a lot of time spent sleeping and doing nothing - habits which stay with many Thai kids throughout the rest of their education/lives. This kind of thing would be OK at a nursery, but by the time kids get to kindergarten they are ready and able to learn a hell of a lot.
Our two year-old knows her English and Thai alphabets, numbers, colours, shapes, and the names of lots of animals. She knows instinctively to speak Thai to her Mum and English to me. She craves knowledge and is always asking questions: What's that? What colour? How many? etc. Her brain is like a little sponge and she can remember a lot of things after being told just once. I have started teaching her how to spell and she can spell some basic words.
If she had to suffer this timetable every day for three years she would be bored out of her skull and she would learn very little. The Thai education system repeatedly appears at the bottom of world education surveys and the problems begin early. It hardly seems five minutes since she was born and already we are running into problems with the education system.
We have looked at a number of kindergartens, but none impressed me. I was optimistic at first with a couple of schools because of their fancy advertising and websites, but the reality was very different.
One problem was the same as with the timetable above. We saw kids who obviously weren't being taught anything. Another issue was safety. At one school we were met by a very surly woman who was most unhelpful. I asked if we could look around, expecting to be shown around.
Instead, she just opened the door and let us look around unsupervised. We could have been child abductors, for all she knew. We saw rooms full of three year-old children who were unsupervised and looking bored. I was not at all impressed.
My wife was keen to get her into a certain school, but for selfish reasons I wasn't keen. This school is located downtown and the drive there in the morning rush hour will be a nightmare. With the wife looking after a new baby, it will be my responsibility to do the school run.
Anyway, we went to look at this school and compared to the others it is far superior. Our poor child had to do an entrance test, but we found out today that she passed. My wife is thrilled. I'm pleased because I want her to be in a safe environment and also to learn something at the same time. However, driving four times a day in Thai rush hour traffic is not something that I am looking forward to.
This is the first of many problems I am anticipating with the education system. The kindergarten she will attend should be fine, and actually I'm not too worried about Pratom level. Learning to speak, read and write Thai is very important when living in Thailand and the infamous Thai system of rote learning at Pratom level is perfect for this. Rote learning isn't always made if it is used for subjects where a lot of memorisation is required.
The thing that does concern me at this level is the indoctrination. From a very early age Thai children are indoctrinated with the values that the government believes they should have. The basic objective is to turn students into tractable subjects of the state who do what they are told and don't cause any problems. Read Mulder if you wish to know more.
I plan to supplement her education and I will be her English teacher. There are also lots of life skills that aren't taught at schools anywhere in the world, and it is my aim to teach her some of these.
A few people have suggested home schooling, but I am not keen. This would be a huge burden and responsibility on my wife and I and I don't think it would be good for my daughter, either. In addition to academic skills, she needs to learn the socialisation skills that she will only develop by mixing with lots of other people.
Thai schools do a good job teaching Thai and the other thing they are good at is getting kids through university entrance exams. In fact, they put too much emphasis on getting kids through exams and not enough emphasis on actually educating them.
My means, unfortunately, do not extend to paying for international school fees. I could just about do it for one child (even though life would be a struggle financially), but I certainly couldn't do it for two children.
My brother, a rich banker in Singapore with a villa in Phuket, sends his daughter to an excellent international school in Phuket. Yingluck sends Nong Pike to one of the best international schools in Bangkok. Money is always a solution to problems in Thailand, but only a select few are in a position where money is no object.
I used to work for an Englishman who runs a language institute here. He has been involved with the Thai education system for a long time and understands it very well. When his eldest daughter finished Pratom he sent her to Malaysia for her high school education.
The Malaysian education system isn't particular good, coming below Thailand in the latest PISA survey, but there are some good international schools in Malaysia. However, sending a child to boarding school is difficult emotionally and it also means paying for boarding fees. This is also an expensive option.
The education system in Singapore regularly comes near the top in education surveys, such as PISA, but education (along with everything else) in Singapore is very expensive and way beyond my means.
My only choice seems to be to try to get the best out of the Thai education system while also supplementing my children's education with home tutoring.
Dear readers - all six of you.
I need to let you know that I'm running out of time to do this blog and I'm not going to have any free time at all during the first few months of next year. We are expecting our second child in January, my parents will be staying for a month, and I'm also expecting a visit from my oldest Thai friend in January.
With my wife taking care of a new baby I will be looking after our daughter a lot more, including running her back and forth to kindergarten.
I share laundry duties with my wife and instead of the washing machine running three or four times a week, as it does now, I expect it will be running every day next year. There is never a day here when something doesn't need cleaning, washing, ironing or repairing.
In addition, this blog gets very few visitors and I always seem to be writing about the same old things because problems in Thailand never get fixed.
Problems in Thailand go round in endless cycles and I have become slightly bored of writing about flooding every rainy season, road accidents every day, and political protests every couple of years. Living in Thailand is like being in the movie 'Groundhog Day'.
In my old corporate life I did quite a lot of non-technical training. Some was very good and I learned some important lessons. When setting expectations it is always good to remember that you can have anything, but you can't have everything.
Another piece of advice was always to ask yourself whether what you are doing is making the best use of your time. Quite frankly, writing posts here isn't making the best use of my time. I also suspect that in years to come the millions of people who now spend all day on Twitter and Facebook may have a few regrets about the amount of time they wasted when they could have been doing something useful.
I don't want to say that I am stopping only to start up again later because I did that before and it gets boring. However, don't expect too much until I have more free time on my hands. There are simply not enough hours in the day for me to carry out my responsibilities at home and write here.
I am looking at ways to try to improve the situation. Next year, instead of making four trips to drop my daughter off at school, return home, and then pick her up again, I may decide to stay in town all day with a netbook. This will reduce the number of journeys to two and it will give me several hours of quality time without any interruptions so that I can write. Our old maid may also be returning in January to help us with the housework and laundry. That will help a lot if it happens.
One thing that I have wanted to do for years is to update the rest of this site because I wrote many things too soon when I didn't have a clear enough understanding of Thailand. I also need to work on my Hat Yai Tourist Guide because that's the part of my site that gets most visitors and neglecting it isn't fair to the people who visit. There are also some other things that I want to do.
In summary, I'm not stopping but I am being forced to slow down. When I post something new I normally update the RSS feed. If you can work out how to use this technology (I can't!) it should tell you whenever there is something new. I will try to post something at least once a week.
Monday 9th December 2013
I can't be bothered to go out at the moment, but my wife tells me that there are thousands of protesters on the streets everywhere. There was a time when I would have gone out to take photos of this kind of thing, but now I just get bored with the insane way in which Thais carry on.
The District Hall is one of the targets, as is the provincial saalaa glaang where Thais get issued with passports and other things.
All members of the Democrat party have resigned and if I remember correctly they previously refused to stand in an election. They know that they will lose in an election and therefore simply choose not to participate. I've always been impressed with Abhisit, but his TV interviews haven't been very convincing this week.
By not providing any opposition to the government I guess that this could signal the end of Western style electoral politics in Thailand. That may not actually be a bad thing for the country.
A country chooses either to have a democratic form of government, or it doesn't. You can't choose democracy and then behave in this manner, even if power is being abused.
Thais need to be true to themselves. The Thai value system is completely different to Western value systems, yet Thais decided to have a Western style form of government that they don't really believe in. It would be inaccurate to say that they don't have values, but they need to align their systems of politcs with their own value system.
Thai PM Yingluck to dissolve parliament and call elections
What's the point? This is what has happened before and the same thing will happen again if elections are called. The same party (be it with the same name or a different one), directed by the same person, will emerge once again and the same problems will start all over again. If the government has no opposition I'm not sure how this will be handled constitutionally.
The protesters are saying that they want Yingluck and the entire Shinawatra family out of the country so that Thaksin can't back another political party. With so many people accepting patronage from Thaksin, I doubt that this is possible.
But even if it was, the system as it is in Thailand will allow other rich businessmen to control politics in the same way. This is the way that Thai money politics works. It's hopeless.
Thailand never moves forward. The same problems keep going around in a perpetually rotating circle. It pains me to see so much political strife, but I have very little sympathy because it is all self-inflicted. There has always been a national arrogance that the Thai way is always the right way and this is the end result. The chickens are now coming home to roost.
A few years ago I was in Singapore and took a fairly early train into the central business district. I saw a sight that I had only previously seen in countries such as the UK, US and Canada.
There was a pile of that day's newspapers for sale, but no vendor present. Instead, there was an honesty box for people to deposit money if they wished to buy a newspaper. Had I been in the UK or North America I wouldn't have thought anything of this. However, it seemed unusual in Southeast Asia. It shouldn't have done because Singapore is nothing like the rest of Southeast Asia, but it did.
Fairly recently I was reading some more about Lee Kuan Yew. He studied in England and spent time there when Singapore was just like other parts of Southeast Asia. Apparently, he was amazed to see newspapers being sold like this in London and to him this was the mark of a civilised society.
After the way that he transformed Singapore from Third World to First, I guess that one of the final acid tests to determine whether Singapore was civilised or not was to see whether people would respect an honesty box. It worked. It would be interesting to perform a similar experiment in Bangkok and see how much money was left in the box at the end of the day.
LKY is extremely critical of welfare states, such as the one that exists in the UK, but he took various aspects from different cultures that he regarded as being good and used these to build modern day Singapore.
This is what any sensible individual or country will do. Analyse what other individuals and countries do and then take the best from each.
Something else caught my eye regarding Mandela's death. In a similar way to LKY, he disagreed with many things the British had been responsible for, but he ".. absorbed what was good about British values, like a sense of justice and fairness."
Nelson Mandela death: His mixed relationship with Britain
In this age of Political Correctness, it isn't PC to say that there was anything good about the colonial era. Thais are immensely proud that the country was never colonised, even though the country ceded vast amounts of territory to avoid colonisation, and England and France were happy to use Thailand as a buffer state between British and French colonial territory.
However, I think the country would have benefited a lot from a little colonial rule. English language skills would have been better, and the justice and fairness that impressed Mandela may even have rubbed off on Thais. It is the unfairness in Thai society, where so few get so much and so many get so little, that is the cause of the present political troubles.
As is usually the case with Thailand, foreigners and foreign ideas are only used selectively to enhance the lives of a select group of Thais. Wealthy Thais get richer from the tourist dollars that come into the country. They have an abundance of cheap, exploited labour at their disposal and they are able to buy the foreign consumer goods that they lust over.
Thais are interested in the money and consumer goods from abroad. They are not interested in the basic beliefs, values and principles of Western countries. They pay lip service to Western style democracy and constitutions, but when these things don't work in accordance with the desires of the people who wield the real power in Thailand, the constitution is rewritten and/or democratically elected governments forced out by military coups or violent protests.
A few years ago, the disaffected majority put their faith into the hands of a very rich man because he was smart and knew that by giving them a little to win their hearts and minds it would make him an assailable force in Thai politics. With this power he has been able to do anything, knowing that if anyone objects he can call another election and be voted in again with the people's mandate. This is in accordance with the Thais style of democracy that Thais themselves chose after the events of 1932.
I still can't see a way forward for Thailand unless there is a major shift in the Thai value system and the fundamental way in which Thais think. That isn't going to happen overnight. It will take at least a generation after a complete change in the education system, and considering that no changes are deemed to be necessary (becuase Thais are always right) nothing will change in the foreseeable future.
What a mess.
I just read an excellent article by Christopher G. Moore about the underlying causes of the current political problems in Thailand and how they relate to Thai cultural behaviour, with particular emphasis on the Thai cultural trait of 'greng jai'.
A Thai person asked me today what foreigners think of the situation. I think that in general foreigners living in Thailand, or those with a close interest in Thailand, have one opinion, but tourists and casual observers don't really understand the background to what is going on.
Even with the ones who have a good understanding, not many have the ability to write as articulately as this.
Thai Political Super Storms: Kreng Jai System under Attack by Christopher G. Moore
Phuket visa-run van crashes in Malaysia
Another visa run van crash recently resulted in a Filipino lady being killed. The drivers of these vans are aggressive maniacs with absolutely no concern for the safety of their passengers or other road users.
Phuket visa run crash leaves one dead
No matter what speed I drive at, whenever I look in my mirror there are minivans racing up behind ready to undertake, overtake, or to sit on my tail trying to intimidate me to move over.
Before I had a car I was sometimes forced to use passenger vans because there were no alternative transport options. The drivers overload the vans, drive at very high speed, cut up other vehicles, use the wrong lanes, and basically do anything - regardless of traffic laws - if they think it will save a few seconds. Some journeys were terrifying.
Quite a few of these vans have the name of the company that owns them written on the side, and quite a few are visa run services. In this part of Thailand they are either going down to the Thai Consulate in Penang or just going to the Malaysian border in Dannok.
These vans kill quite a number of passengers every year in Thailand. If possible, avoid using them. Trains and big buses are more comfortable and generally safer, although trains and big buses in Thailand also have their problems.
The government needs to introduce legislation to physically limit the speed of passenger vans to 80km/h. The police should also introduce some campaigns to monitor and prosecute speeding, aggressive van drivers. These actions wouldn't eradicate the problem, but they would help.
Phuket road accidents claim lives of two men with same last name
Boy, 14, killed by Phuket tour bus
Tuesday 3rd December 2013
This is my oldest Thai friend with his niece and nephew. His nephew is a full time monk.
From what I can make out Piak was a personal assistant to a fairly high ranking American serviceman when the United States military had a big presence in Thailand.
When the American military left Thailand, the guy he had been working for sponsored him to become a citizen of the US. He thus emigrated and found a job with the Patagonia clothing company in Ventura, California. That was around 35 years ago.
We met in Pattaya in 1987. I was enjoying my first visit to Thailand with a friend and Piak was back in Thailand for a vacation. The three of us had fun together and he gave us some protection from the many cheats in Thailand. Whenever we wanted to buy something, he made sure that we got a fair price and didn't pay the raa-kaa farang.
I'm terrible at keeping in touch, but he is very good. After we all went home he made a big effort to keep in touch and our friendship has lasted to this day. He visited me in the UK and I visited him in California. Ventura is a fabulous part of the world and I really enjoyed my trips there. His company transferred him to Reno several years ago.
He has now retired, but can't decide where he wants to spend his retirement. He seems quite keen to stay in the States, but his family are putting a lot of pressure on him to return to Thailand.
This Thursday he will arrive in Thailand and his plan is to stay for one year to see if he thinks he can live in Thailand again. He has lived in the US for over half his life and culturally he is more American than Thai. If he comes back to live in Thailand permanently he will experience the same kind of culture shock that affects Westerners coming to live in Thailand.
Very few Thais living abroad seem keen to return to Thailand. As a tourist and also as a new expat I thought that Thailand was the best country in the world and therefore couldn't figure out why so many Thais wanted to leave and never come back. After 10 years in Thailand I now understand why.
Piak's life in the US has been good. His job was fairly ordinary but he earned enough money to rent an apartment, buy a car, travel and send money home to his family. He has travelled quite a lot in the US and abroad. Now that he has retired he has a pension and doesn't have to work.
These are all things that are beyond the expectations of most Thais. Their salaries are so low that they only have just about enough to live on. Motorbikes are more common than cars, most Thais have travelled very little, and pensions are almost unheard of. Most Thais have to work for as long as they can and then hope that their children support them in old age.
One of the first girls I got involved with in Thailand came from a very poor village in Isaan. She was an attractive and bright girl but, of course, had no opportunities in life. She had a son, but the child wasn't able to walk and the father had gone AWOL.
She had to take care of her parents, her son, and also a nephew who her parents looked after. She went off to work in massage parlours and then ended up doing what many poor Isaan girls do to earn money. She went to work in Phuket.
She found me through this website earlier this year and sent me an e-mail. She had been working in Phuket and met a Norwegian guy. She married him and then went to live in Norway. She now has polar bears as neighbours and runs the world's northernmost Thai restaurant.
She seems to be both happy and successful. All she needed was an opportunity in life, but had she stayed in Thailand she would never have got such an opportunity. This is what is so unfair about Thai society. People like her at the bottom of the hierarchy get nothing in life and no opportunities to improve their lives. One Thai politician actually said that northeasterners should not aspire to be any more in life than maids or gas station attendants.
My friend Piak doesn't have a great intellect and didn't get a great education. In Thailand he would probably have lived a life of drudgery, as many Thais do, but in the States he did a lot better for himself. Even now he is reluctant to return permanently.
He works hard and he is the most selfless person I have ever met. It is the same with his niece. While other people are around they only think of other people and never themselves. Even if Piak was starving he would give his last bowl of rice to someone else. Some Thais are really wonderful people.
The girl running a Thai restaurant in Norway told me that there is a fair sized Thai population in Svalbard, where she lives. Even hotel maids get paid good salaries and they make far more money than they could ever earn in Thailand.
Many Thais who leave the country have no desire to return. It will be interesting to see what my friend decides to do. There will be lots of pressure on him to stay, but he needs to do what is best for him.
Monday 2nd December 2013
The turmoil in Thailand has affected the strength of the Baht, making it weaker against many other currencies. Channel News Asia, based in Singapore, reported that Singaporeans are taking advantage of this and making trips to Thailand.
They also reported from Golden Mile Complex, which is Singapore's 'Little Thailand', and said that Thais who work in Singapore and send money home are sending more back at the moment to take advantage of the improved exchange rate.
The problems have strengthened the UK pound by a couple of Baht. This helps Brits, but still doesn't compensate for the Bt10 fall in the exchange rate that occurred within a couple of months at the end of 2008.
Even as late as April 2007 I was still getting over Bt67. Earlier this year the actual rate - not the interbank rate - was down as low as Bt44. This has made a huge difference to my spending power in Thailand.
When I did the sums a few years ago I anticipated that I was going to be living a very easy life by now. That didn't happen. I manage, but not as easily as I had previously hoped.
The official rate now is Bt52.45 and I usually get about a Baht less than the interbank rate when I transfer money. With events still unfolding I expect that it may still go up a little, but as soon as things calm down in Thailand it will plummet again.
When I first arrived in Thailand I got money from ATMs. The exchange rate was almost Bt75 and it seemed cheap. Later on, with falling exchange rates and both banks making a charge for international transactions, it started to get very expensive.
I now use a specialist money transfer company in the UK. They are efficient and a lot cheaper than my bank. I'd like to be able to give the company a plug here, but with so much fraud on the Internet it probably isn't wise to give details of my financial matters.
A reader of this blog advised me that post offices in the UK now have very competitive rates for international money transfers. I don't know the details, but it could be worthwhile checking out.
The Nation reports that hotel bookings are down in Krabi this year because people are concerned about the protests and they are cancelling their bookings.
Krabi experiences a drop in hotel booking
Wise travellers will realise that Thailand is a big country, that the trouble is only likely to be in certain areas of Bangkok, and that genuine bargains can be picked up at times such as this. In addition to flight and hotel bargains they will also be able to take advantage of current exchange rates that may soon disappear again.
The rain has been torrential again. Fortunately, there was a break between this period of wet weather and the wet weather last week. Had there not been a break I think that flooding would have occurred.
A friend of my wife's who lives in Phuket main town suffered flooding on Saturday. She rents a ground floor place and has no second floor. She's an artist and has a lot of art work in her house. The water didn't last very long, but it is never easy or convenient dealing with flooding.
The Fast and Furious series of films about illegal street racing are cult movies in Thailand and if you have ever driven in Thailand it will be obvious why. Many young Thai men use public roads as their own personal race tracks.
Paul Walker, a star of the franchise, just died in a car accident. Had I not read that the car he was in was a Porsche Carrera GT I would not have recognised it from the photos.
Fast & Furious star Paul Walker dead in fiery car wreck
What saddens me is that no matter how many accidents there are or how many people die, including high-profile celebrities, nothing will ever change regarding road safety in Thailand.
Sunday 1st December 2013
Welcome back, or welcome for the first time, to my new-look Thai breadmaking blog where we don't discuss anything about politics, education, insurgencies, civil war, feudalism, road accidents, road rage, flooding, violence, guns, prostitution, corruption, or anything else that could possibly paint the Land of Smiles in a bad light.
Depending on where you are in Thailand, good fresh bread may be easily available or it may not.
I live in the biggest city in southern Thailand and fresh bread is only available in the town centre. However, the town centre area is far too congested and chaotic for my liking so I now live quite a long way out. The round trip into town to buy bread takes an hour or more.
Even then, buying bread isn't straightforward. Sometimes the bread on sale was made the day before. Sometimes, today's fresh bread is sold out, and sometimes it isn't ready. On a few occasions I have gone to buy bread in the morning only to be told it won't be ready until 3pm.
To remedy the situation you can take the same approach as I did:
- Find a Thai girl who likes baking
- Marry her
- Buy a house in her name
- Buy her a Western style kitchen with an oven
- Send her for a few lessons at the local community college
- Buy her all the extra equipment and ingredients she needs
- Give her lots of encouragement and praise
- Enjoy the results of her efforts (see photo above)
A cheaper alternative might be to buy an automatic breadmaker. I bought such a machine recently and so far the wife has just been using it to knead dough, which she then transfers to the oven.
She disappeared this afternoon to do her lottery selling thing, but before she went she set the machine up to bake a loaf. She added flour, yeast, salt and water. All of these ingredients are easily available in Thailand. The machine does everything - it mixes the ingredients, kneads the dough, allows it to rise, and bakes the bread.
When it had finished its programme the bread looked a little anaemic and so I selected the bake only programme and baked it for a further 15 minutes. The result was quite acceptable. I wouldn't say that it is the best bread I have ever eaten, but it is far better than the sliced bread that can be bought from branches of 7-Eleven.
The model of bread maker is a Severin 3983. These are made in Germany and therefore the quality should be good. I bought ours in Thailand and assume that they are available in other parts of Thailand.
If you can't find a dealer, contact Verasu Ltd at 83/7 Wireless Road, Lumpini, Patumwan, Bangkok, 10330. This information is from the Severin Worldwide page.
Analytics is a service provided by Google and it is freely available to people who have websites. By simply adding a few lines of Javascript code to each website page the owner of the site can analyse visitor behaviour. It is possible to see what content attracts visitors, how long they stay, and which page they leave from, etc.
Someone at the Phuket Gazette has been looking at their Google Analytics statistics and was horrified to see how few people are interested in human rights issues, the plight of the Rohingya people, or the destruction of the environment.
I imagine that people working for the Phuket Gazette take themselves fairly serious regarding these issues, but they also report whenever large snakes are discovered and captured in residential areas of Phuket.
It is these stories about large snakes that are the most popular with the Gazette's readers. The person who wrote the editorial describes this as shameful and depressing. However, he also admits to being part of the problem.
This is symptomatic of the world we live in. Some time ago, I posted a link to a video of a presentation by two of Thailand's foremost experts on Thai politics. I found it very interesting and figured that other people would find it interesting.
Understanding the Colors of Thai Politics
We are told that Thailand receives over 20 million visitors each year and there is also a large resident expat population. You would imagine that these people would want to know more about the country.
The video was uploaded in April 2011 and, as I write, the number of views is 1,741 (about a dozen of those are mine). That's just over 50 a month. It's free to watch and the presenters have written many fascinating books about Thailand. Fifty views a month.
My two year-old daughter has reached the toy stage and likes watching Youtube videos about Play Doh on her Mum's iPad. She can't handle the mouse on my computer, but she can navigate her way around the iPad better than some adults.
Her viewing habits have been quite an eye-opener for me. A young girl in the States, who I believe is 16, has made almost 800 videos where she reviews toys, including Play Doh based toys. These videos appear high in the search results and are very popular with my daughter. The creator of the videos seems to buy most of her toys from Walmart and goes under the name of DisneyCollectorBR.
Her videos get millions of views each month and I would imagine that the revenue she collects in advertising easily covers the cost of the toys she buys to review.
This is not a criticism. In fact, I admire her for identifying and filling a niche on the Internet that is so popular with so many people. Play Doh is so much more interesting than Thai politics.
The editor at the Phuket Gazette shouldn't be depressed about his website statistics because this is just the way of the world. As Michael Moore said, most people aren't interested in the issues they should be interested in, but waste their time watching Youtube videos of cats flushing toilets.
I try to discuss some serious issues in this blog and try to give some insights as to what it is really like living in Thailand. As I have said many times, the Thailand that tourists see is not representative of the real Thailand.
The number of visitors to this blog per day is in single figures and the page that has always attracted most visitors is the one I wrote about Thai girls.
Similarly, the most popular page of the Hat Yai guide I wrote is the one about nightlife. The street map page also gets quite a few hits. I guess that once people identify which nightlife venue they want to go to, they then want to find out where it is.
The first thing that many foreigners think about in Thailand is sex and prostitution. Websites about these subjects attract visitors but a serious presentation on Thai politics by two of the people most qualified to talk about the subject receives less than two visitors a day.
In many ways I can understand this. The world is in a terrible mess and most people probably feel worse off than they did a few years ago. I certainly do.
As an unknowing, ignorant tourist visiting Thailand, it was always a magical experience. For a few weeks I could forget all the crap that went on elsewhere and enjoy life somewhere that seemed perfect.
Thais always present a good image of the country and if you don't understand or know anything about what really goes on, all you have to go on is the image that is presented to you. There is nothing to destroy the illusion.
Conversely, if you start learning the language and start reading too much about the country the perfect illusion can be destroyed very quickly and the magic disappears. And then what? When Thailand appears to be no better (or, in many cases, worse) than where you had escaped from, where do you go next?
Naively, I thought that with so many foreigners living in and visiting Thailand there would be a fair amount of interest in tutorials teaching foreigners how to read basic Thai so that they could identify buses and negotiate menus, etc.
A few years ago I put quite a lot of effort and time into producing such tutorials. Very few people visit those pages and there is virtually no interest. I could be disappointed, but why should I be? It's not my problem if people aren't interested in developing new, useful skills.
I received a very complimentary e-mail last week from someone who had just started doing a year's voluntary work in Thailand and decided straight away to learn how to read Thai. He is using my tutorials. This was my approach when I came to Thailand, but it is quite unusual. I receive about two e-mails a year about those tutorials.
The Phuket Gazette shouldn't be despondent. People aren't interested in the Rohingya people, but they are interested in large pythons. The newspaper should therefore just tell its reporters to get out there and find more snake stories. You can't make people interested in subjects that they aren't interested in.
I have stopped doing this blog on a few occasions, and have thought about stopping it on several other occasions. I am aware that a few people visit regularly and I really appreciate their support. But, to be honest, the visitor numbers in relation to the amount of time it takes me doesn't make it worth my while.
It would make a lot more sense to work on parts of the site that get a lot of visitors, such as my Hat Yai guide, or the parts of the site that interest me most, such as the Learning to read Thai tutorials. With another child arriving soon I may be forced to stop anyway.
If you would like me to write about a specific subject or have questions, please feel free to drop me a line. Some two-way communication would be good, but I decided against allowing comments here.
Many farangs get extremely hot under the collar about issues in Thailand and comments would need to be heavily moderated, which is something I haven't got the time to do.