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

Now, that is something I’d love to do at some point in my life. What an adventure – physically exerting, potentially tough living conditions, fantastic photo opportunities, real friendship building, a chance to meet many great people by staying with couch surfers, and simply just the opportunity to do something different.

Unfortunately, the industry I’m in at this point in time won’t allow something of that sort. In the IT industry, taking two years off will render you useless when you return. You’ll be doing things that were “so two years ago” and that would have been far surpassed by newer and greater technology. Yes, in IT, two years off would be career suicide – unless you spent awhile catching up on what you’d missed.

Isn’t it unfortunate, having probably my two biggest interests (IT and travel/photography/adventure) in conflicting areas? And so begins another thing in my quest to find out what I shall do in life.

Basically, the idea is that you make your couch available for people to sleep on when they’re in town and need somewhere to stay. And, when you go away, you can search for available couches in the places you’re visiting, and crash on them rather than forking out money for a hostel!

I think it would appeal greatly to youth, and backpackers. And I really like the idea, because it will:

- save me money;
- introduce me to new, cool people;
- help me experience a new place, and not just see it;
- and beacuse it’s just different

Next time I go away, I’ll be looking for a couch. And, my couch is potentially available for surfers visiting Canberra – at this point in time it just depends on parental approval.

See it for yourself – visit www.couchsurfing.com – and contact me once you’re signed up.

So, I’ve started my “new” job – which is really just going full time at the place I used to work at casually. So far I’m enjoying it, and there’s new things that we’re venturing into which will be a lot of fun (but which I can’t detail here).

And, today was a lovely day so I decided to take some pictures around the house & garden (I was too lazy to go further than that…. I really need to get back into bike riding). Here’s a spider web that I found outside the front door:

13/11/05: A spider web in the front yard

But, the trip was great – and I certainly want to go back to Europe again! I have plans for a 3 month around Europe trip with friends sometime in the next few years… I don’t know if it will happen though!

Tomorrow I go back to work, where alot has changed in the last six weeks. There’ll be a lot more new processes to learn, and even new people to meet, but I’m looking forward to it.

And, I’ve just uploaded over 300 more photos of my trip, from London (including the London Eye), Berlin, Italy and some people at Rosie’s work. Hopefully I’ll manage to add captions to most of them as well… but if you have any questions about any of the photos, just post a comment on it and I’ll reply.

Tim

Today I went around London, and am currently in Greenwich, where Greenwich Mean Time comes from. I stood at the East Meridian (or whatever its called), and had one foot in the eastern hemisphere and one in the western. I asked a Thai family to take a photo of me (I realised they were Thai when I heard them counting while taking their own photos), and they were shocked when I thanked them (in Thai) for taking a photo of me.

Anyway, that’s all for now – I’m going to find somewhere to have dinner, then go back home. I can’t upload photos at the moment because I’m at an Internet cafe, and I probably won’t get a chance to upload photos again maybe even until just before I leave – but I’ll see how it goes.

Tim

Rome: The highlights in Rome were visiting the famous old things such as the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, the Roman Forum (which we didn’t see much of because it was raining) and the Vatican City. We were lucky to be in Rome on Wednesday morning, so we got to see the Pope ride around in his little car. Another highlight was standing in a line for the Vatican museum eating gelati (Italian icecream) while it was pelting down rain, with the umbrella sellers walking up and down the line making their fortune.

Florence: Apparently, Florence has the biggest variety of things to buy in Italy, and we certainly found that to be true. We bought clothes, scarfes, souvineers, pasta and a new bag to fit it all in. The shopping was the highlight in Florence.

Pisa: We only spent about an hour or so in Pisa, and saw the leaning tower (which is pretty much all there is there). So, the leaning tower was the highlight . We got to the train station in Pisa not really knowing how to find the tower, so we went for a walk and got lost, so went back to the station and spent 5 euro on a tourist map, only to find outside the other side of the station there was a big map we could have just looked at!

Venice: The highlight in Venice was walking around exploring the city without traffic noise. Once you actually get into Venice, there’s no cars, buses or trains – just people walking and buskers playing and boats and gondolas. We didn’t spend 60 euros to ride a gondola, but we took a cheaper way by taking a traghetto (pretty much a gondola that just crosses the grand canal) for a 90 second ride at 50 euro cents each.

So there’s the quick rundown of the trip! I’ve uploaded some photos from Rome, as well as some from London before we went to Italy, and there’ll be more photos on their way when I get time to upload them.