This is a repost of a post I made this afternoon on the Malones in Thailand website.
We’ve been here in Thailand now for over a week, and it’s just under three weeks until I go back home to Canberra. People ask me how it’s going, and how I’m feeling, and really, at the moment everything just feels normal. I’ve been to Thailand twice before – spent a total of 9 weeks here before this trip – so I know the culture, I know how to get around, and I know a bit of the language. We’re living in an apartment that could easily be an apartment back home (as far as living conditions go, apart from the filtered water), and I’ve joined the sports club in the complex so I’m swimming and going to the gym often. We have broadband Internet access, and I’m using my laptop, and we’re eating food that I’m quite happy with. I’ve been off work since the end mid June so it doesn’t even feel like a holiday as such.
It feels normal, almost as if I’m back in Canberra.
So for me, this doesn’t feel any different yet. In two weeks, when it gets close to the time when I’m preparing to leave, and preparing to say goodbye to my family, I will perhaps start feeling a bit different.
It’s great to be overseas again. Being brought up having a major family holiday each year, and with a dad who loves travelling, I’ve always had my own itchy feet for travel. This is my first overseas trip in two years, and my first one since turning 18. That means I’ve got new travelling things to think about, such as making sure my bills are paid, and that my bank knows I might be using my credit card over here. And being out of Australia again I’m returning to those thoughts of where I might end up when I’ve finished this “phase” of my life – may I come back to Thailand to live, or perhaps Germany (I’ve always loved Germany since learning the language in high school). I’m thinking it very possible that I might go and grab an around the world ticket after another year or so of work to see what’s out there before making a decision on where to go…
One of my tasks here in the past week has been to set up my family’s tech gear. If you asked me what the biggest challenge was, then I’d say – and it still is a challenge – reassuring dad that the phone calls we’re making to Australia really are costing only 10c, and are not being timed. The second biggest challenge would have been finding the little peice of technology that allows us to do this. It’s called an Analog Telephony Adapter (or VoIP adapter), and essentially it lets us plug a standard telephone into the Internet to make cheap calls over it. Being a fairly new and unknown technology even in the Western world, it wasn’t easy to locate over here. We ended up looking through probably about 30 IT stores over two IT centered shopping plazas before we found one store that sold them.
The end result – we have a Canberra based phone number here that works just like a Canberra based phone number. People from Canberra can call us for the cost of a local call, and we can call anywhere in Canberra (or in fact, in Australia) for just 10c untimed. The only downside is that because we don’t have a super fast Internet connection, we need to limit our Internet usage whilst someone is on the phone – as long as we do that, the quality of the call is no different to normal.
In other news, I ate my first real spicy thai dish today. It was hot. I can’t remember what it was, but I saw it sitting there at the food court in the shopping mall near our place, and I thought I’d just go and give it a try. I do remember it had some sort of meat in it, as well as some greens, rice, and of course chilli. I ate it in rounds, and had plain white rice in between each round in an attempt to nullify the spicy aftertaste. Three rounds took me to the end of the plate. In between each round, I would wait for perhaps 3 or 4 seconds before it started. My tounge burned, my throat burned, and my nose ran, but I managed to tell my family that I would never do this if I was going out to lunch with someone for the purposes of conversation.
Turns out that I did make it through the ordeal, and it wasn’t all that bad. It was probably very mild compared to what Thai people sometimes eat, but I’m really not used to it. I’ll wait till tomorrow to see what the pain is like at the other end before I decide whether I’ll do it again.
Anyway, I’m off, we’re going over to Matt’s new school this afternoon – apparently on Sundays they have a get together with a soccer game and a swim, or something along those lines. It is incredibly hot today, compared to what it has been like during the last week, so I’m thinking a swim will be excellent.
Cheers
Tim
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