Thailand - Sunday, April 8 2007

From today we can have breakfast from the in-house restaurant itself, without paying. Today we made it in time and I want to call it as ‘breakfeast’. There is more than enough vegetarian food, including Indian ‘roti’ and ‘dal’. Thank you God, you are taking good care of me. But I did not take that since I am not here to taste roti and dal.



This place has so many ‘Thai Massage’ centers. Some do exclusive foot massage. They display the picture of typical feet and the points affecting the organs. This hotel’s health club division also offers one, but I don’t know the rates. Just outside they charge Bt.250 per hour. I don’t believe that all these mushroom massage centers have got professional masseurs. My wife’s one of the colleagues visited a massage center very happily to de-stress and walked out with severe head ache!! But I personally believe in massage therapy.

I was wondering why this many colors of Taxis here. Ha ha, coz, they are operated by different agencies and each one has got there own color. So, if we want to remember a taxi for any reason, we need to remember the number as well as color. This makes it easy to identify the car.

The King of Thailand is still highly respected and loved by the people. Somebody posted a video mocking the king and thus ‘YouTube’ got banned in Thailand. Government’s intervention into internet is quite often in this country. They already blocked abt 45,000 sites!, mostly porn. Sites linked to ousted prime minister also got axed.

So many Lampoo trees got cut during these days in Amphawa. This is near the famous floating market. The reason? Locals are fed up of ‘firefly tourists’!!!. According to them, trees attract fireflies and fireflies attract tourists. Obviously these tourists come only at night and make lots of noise. I don’t agree with cutting the trees but I strongly support the locals. We don’t have any right to trouble these locals in the name of tourism.

Floating market in Amphawa has become a too much crowded place, especially the weekends. Mainly coz, this is the ‘Songkran’ festival season, the Thai New Year. This festival attracts many tourists (but Bangkok takes a breath of relief during these holiday period. Locals go to their native place. Most of them get about 5 days of holidays). The main problem is this area is not prepared to handle this much or tourists and waste.

Yoga is becoming popular in Thailand and today there came ‘big’ article in ‘Nation’

Today I visited a department store called Tesco Lotus, which is quite famous for shopping. Here we get goods at reasonable price, or it is what it is known for. Visitors were mostly locals and not tourists. But it took some time to make the driver understand which place I am talking about when I said ‘Tesco’ to him in my accent. This incident told me that I should try to understand more about Thai language.