The time has come…. this afternoon I fly out of Bangkok after spending a month here with my family.

I’m not really sure what else to write here other than the obvious. I’ll certainly miss them, and I’m sure they’ll miss me as well, but I’m also looking forward to being more independent and branching out more, so to say. The next stage of my life begins here.

For my last dinner here last night, we ate at an MK Restaurant – it’s a restaurant chain here in Thailand. The funniest thing about this place is that on the hour, every hour, the waiters and waitresses (and even some of the cooks) stop what they’re doing to do a little dance. Check it out below:

Here’s us at the restaurant towards the end of our dinner:

And here’s a scene outside the shopping mall as we were going in:

My plane leaves at 5:35pm local time, and in 24 hours time from now I will be home!

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

Today is the last day in Australia for likely three years for mum, dad, Karis and Matt. I’ll be back in a month – I’m only going to help them settle in & get set up – but that month will likely go rather quickly. Come September, my family will be over 7000km away!

There’s not much else I have to say right now really, except for that fact that I hate packing. That’s why I’m blogging, and doing things to my Facebook like trying to beat Matt on the Traveller IQ Challenge or adding new books to my visual bookshelf.

I really don’t know why I hate packing. But I have to leave it to the last minute, for some reason.

If I have something to say, or something to video, I’ll post it here while I’m away. Otherwise, enjoy the month of August!

Tim

It was Sunday morning when we found out that one of our friends in Thailand died suddenly of a heart attack on Saturday. His name was Al Steiner, and he was someone we knew for only a very short time, yet someone who made a huge impact on us.

Since Mum & Dad decided earlier this year to move back to Thailand as full time missionaries in a few years, I was quite certain that I would be staying here in Australia. However, after meeting Al in October, I started to rethink that. Al floated the idea with me of him and I going into a partnership teaching English and computing basics to Thai businessmen, and it was something that I instantly begun thinking about. After we’d left Thailand, he told me in an e-mail “you would be the person I would chose to work with. That tells me God’s in it.”

Even though we only spent such a short time with him, we felt like we’d known him for ages. We all shared so much together, and we heard the intriguing story of how he and his family came to be in Thailand eleven years ago (from the United States). Mum & Dad were looking forward to working with him alot when they returned to Thailand, and I too was mulling over the vision he presented to me.

But all that can change so quickly, and it did. After undergoing a routine stress test at the hospital on Saturday morning, his heart gave up and he was called home. Although he was the second death of a friend that I’ve experienced, he was the first Christian one – and just to think that right now he is up there with God is… something that’s very hard to explain.

We’ll always remember Al: his humour, his loud voice, the way he took up two places in the lunch line, the things we taught him, and the things he taught us. And we’ll see him again, one day.

Three pictures of Al Steiner, just over six weeks before his death on 26/11/2005

I have about one more hour before my plane departs for London – and it’s not long till I get to see Rosie again, who I haven’t seen since December last year!

More later…

Tim

Thailand is certainly a fun place, and in some ways it’s great to be back. Sure, there’s the high humidity and the dirt that just appears everywhere, but there’s also the friendly Thai people, the relaxed schedules (sometimes), the fun of navigating a path across the busy roads, and the huge variety of foods to try.

Today’s photo (yes, I’m going to try to get a photo-a-day up here as often as possible – it may not be every day!) is of a Thai lunch, and it was taken from a few floors above a restaurant in a Bangkok shopping centre.

I’m also uploading tons of photos to the photo gallery – be sure to check them out as well.

28/09/2005: Lunch from above

It’s 3am, and in about an hour the rest of my family will wake up ready to leave at 5am. I haven’t slept because I’ve been busy packing (left to the last minute, as always – I hate packing).

The trip includes 3 weeks in Thailand on a short term mission, teaching English for a Buddhist school on an English camp, and then the rest of the family go home while I continue on to the UK for another 3 weeks, also visting Italy for one week. It’s a break I’ve earned

I’ll be posting photos and text here frequently (as long as I can find an Internet connection) and the rest of the family will hopefully be posting on www.malones.id.au

Today I’ve moved my business into a new office, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile – and it’s finally happening. Moving into an office means it’s much easier for me to concentrate on work, without the distractions of home, and it means I have a place to seperate work from home.

There’ll likely more more stuff about Thailand coming here soon, when I get time. Happy new year to everyone!

- Tim