Hello again everyone. Finally back on the grid
First some short snappers:
- I didn’t miss all of the basketball tournament – they got rained out a few times, so I was here for the last three games. My team are now the Samui Basketball Club champions. Hooray.
- recently on my way to basketball a man and woman on another motorbike pitched me to buy some opium and/or cocaine. I declined and they sped off looking for another customer.
-why do men in their 50s and 60s wear “do rags” ?
-why do women in their 50s and 60s have tattoos?
-why do none of our friends and family in their 50s and 60s in Canada have either?
-my favourite sign is still “Wear safet helmet”.
-when having soup at a roadside stall, there is an important distinction between pork balls and pig balls.
- I moved here last July with one suitcase and a knapsack. Jacquie came in October with one suitcase and a knapsack (and one dog). On May 24th we moved and it took three full loads on our rented pickup truck.
Moving.
Sucks. Even on a relatively small scale and over a short distance (a touch over 3 km.). On a related topic, my parents moved two days after me – shorter distance but a lot more stuff. Sorry I missed it but hope and trust it went okay.
We moved on the 24th because work for the sailing regatta started on the 25th, so we got a full half day to get settled before spending our week (nine days all in) doing our volunteer thing. Every day we left home a little before 7 am, spent the whole day on the water laying out courses, timing boats, etc., and then raced home to feed and walk Sami before that nights party. Home by midnight so we could get up by 6 am and do it all over. Hectic. On day two I agreed to sit on the jury that decides disputes / protests, Five minutes after I said yes three of the big IRC Racing boats (60 feet long) all headed for the same patch of water rounding a buoy. A collision ensued. And three protests. Suddenly my week got much, much more hectic. A total of 8 protests were filed, 6 had hearings and decisions – and 4 of those were about that one incident. All in my spare time (plus I completely missed the Friday night Land Rover Beach Party because it took us until after midnight to make a decision.
A great time, and we both learned a lot (I now even know who has the right of way coming to a mark). “Jelik”, a beautiful and wicked fast 75 foot yacht with a crew of 19, won its class and the Asian Racing Series title. According to Jacquie we have been asked to go to Phuket to work at the Kings Cup Regatta in December. I also now know to say “no” to the jury gig.
So Sunday June 3rd was the first day we could relax and enjoy our new place. We were exhausted so other than moving some furniture around (surprise) we just laid around and swam and slept (not at the same time). Now it’s Thursday night and it feels like we’ve been living here for a few days.
On the surface this place is awesome. It’s huge – a total of 8 bedrooms, 8 bathrooms, 3 kitchens, media room – high on a hill overlooking 3 beaches and spectacular sunsets and lightning storms, often at the same time. But now that we live here we of course get to see below the surface. So quickly big becomes simply more to look after and further to walk to get from the driveway to our living area, and we notice that there is no gate or security of any kind on the back stairs. We still have no internet – it was promised to be working by last Wednesday and this Wednesday, and I have a call in to ask when it is next promised for. Hey, here that is not even late yet.
The top bit of the road is so steep that our motorbike can’t get up with both of us. Jacquie has to get off and walk up the last 20 feet. And now the drinking water delivery guy says he won’t come up anymore (not too big of a deal – I have started buying it from a small store at the bottom of the hill for the same price (50 cents for 20 liters) and bringing it home one at a time on my motorbike, the Thai way driving one handed).
Okay, that’s about all of the negatives. Everything else about this place is pretty fabulous. The sunsets and lightning storms seem to get more spectacular each day. And the media room has the full meal satellite dish, serving up lots of movie channels and sports (read basketball) when we’re not sitting poolside watching sunsets and lightning storms.
We notice also that Sami is starting to smell a whole lot better now that he is not in the ocean every day. And the ever creepy, regular plucking of ticks from him that started last month has ended now.
I have seen my first ever scorpion (two actually, in one of the bathrooms here ) And a large and very nasty looking poisonous worm stung/bit Jacquie on the stomach. Jacquie is fine. So is the worm (but it lives out in the jungle now). The scorpions are both dead.
We have chosen a bedroom located poolside on the terrace level. The terrace bar has a refrigerator and barbeque, and the staff take the dishes up to the kitchen to wash, so it’s all pretty convenient.
We find it difficult to have staff, but we are doing our best to try to leave them enough to do to keep busy. Lots of yard work, watering, and a couple hours per day pool maintenance. And cleaning. We have started having them prepare and serve our Friday evening meal for us – candlelit table for two poolside. It actually costs as much or more for the ingredients than going to a restaurant, but it’s good practice for them and a nice change for us.
We are settling in - again. Getting a company set up to do some property management, and Jacquie will be using the same company for her furnishing contracts. We hope to get the name Big Black Dog Consulting Limited approved. We continue meeting new people and seem to be going out partying a lot. The biggest problem with the move is that I’m too far away from the “barbequed pork on a stick for breakfast” lady to go every day, but that is balanced by the great restaurant nearby where we can call the owner’s mobile phone to place an order, so we don’t have to wait around.
In a new story, the government here is considering a bill that proposes to ban drinking alcohol in certain public places. The proposed alcohol free zones would include temples, hospitals, drug stores and schools. Seems quite progressive. Or repressive.
Oh yeah, we now have some internet access – sort of. The new antenna is up effective June 15th, but won’t be at full power for “three or four weeks”, so we have access only in a couple of areas of the house, and the way it is implemented we only have access on one computer at a time which is and will remain a complete pain in the ass. On the plus side the company was very proud to tell us they are providing a “free” month of access, after they were paid for a month when there was no access. Wow.
I plan to upload a few photos – of our villa and a sunset or two – to our blog page within a day or so. I’ll send a separate email with the link for looking at those as soon as I post them.
Finally - for this "issue" - an unabashed plug for our friend Monika Wright, a visual artist who has a show of her art in Halifax starting on July 5th. See all of the details on her web site: www.monikawright.com and if you're interested check out the opening night. Sorry Monika, we can't make it. Have a great show.
Bye for now.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Big Adventure 25
If you are reading this we have made it back to and then from Nova Scotia safe and sound.
In my last issue I mentioned, "Our plane to New York leaves at almost midnight on the 20th" and that we would be back there on the 21st. Well, funny story - we actually discovered while standing in line to check in that the plane didn't leave at "almost midnight on the 20th" but rather "just a little after midnight on the 20th". This turned out to be an important distinction, as it meant that our plane had actually left Bangkok about 20 hours earlier - in the early morning of the 20th rather than late at night on the 20th.
The exceptionally nice young woman at the check in counter explained that unfortunately tonight's flight is seriously overbooked, and so while she would put us on the standby list she does not hold out much hope. The is no flight tomorrow, so the next flight leaves early Monday morning. She can not give us standby seats on that - so if tonight's standby doesn't work out we will need to call Aeroplan and rebook reward seats - not gonna happen - or buy full fare seats on that plane. In addition we have also of course missed our flight from New York to Halifax, and our rental car may or may not still be waiting for us in Halifax. AND if we do need to stay here until Sunday night we will have 2 more taxi rides and hope we can find a hotel with a room.
Luckily we got to the airport way early - Jacquie was finished at the decor show on Wednesday, so on Thursday we did some shopping and Friday was an extra day to kill with nothing to do but wait for our flight that left the night before. The reason this was lucky is that it gave us PLENTY of time to beat ourselves and each other up over our complete stupidity. So by the time it was time to go back to that nice young woman at the check in counter to find out if we could go tonight we were pretty much finished with doing so.
While giving us our boarding passes she explained how extremely lucky we are, and suggested that she thought we must be good people because we clearly must have good karma.
We ran to the gate where our flight is now boarding, got stuck in two long security lines, but the flight - that we were not booked on - waited for us (and I assume some other people, but we did appear to be last).
One of the disappointments discussed in detail during our wait was that we had spent 25,000 extra Aeroplan points EACH for business class seats and that our screw up will have ruined that. Well, no, it turned out we even got those seats. I am writing this from somewhere over the north pole while stretched out on my bed after a nice nights sleep. The seat/bed is fully electric with a lovely back massager. And right from the welcome champagne at boarding the service and food has been amazing.
We will be sending a letter to Thai Airways telling them about that nice young woman at the check in counter who we believe got us here and saved us a great deal of grief (caused entirely by our own stupidity).
From JFK in New York (where we arrived at 6:30 am) we took a $35 cab ride to La Guardia. The "sticker shock" has officially begun. At La Guardia we needed to go through the same process - convince Air Canada to honour yesterday's ticket. The woman at the counter did not want to help, but her superior was there and told her to say our connecting flight was late arriving (no kidding) so the ticket could be used - she did manage to charge us $30 for our suitcase being overweight, but that's a small price to pay. Four more hours to spare till our 1:00 pm flight to Halifax - then we'll see if Hertz still has a car there for us.
The rental car should be the easy part. It's fully pre-paid, we're just a day late picking it up. Well not so fast. They need to put a small ($60) hold on a credit card, as a security deposit in case we damage their car (since we are a day late, the piece of crap we rented is gone, so we get the free upgrade to a new Toyota Camry). But our credit cards are refused - a phone call later and we hear that a problem at Homesense / Winners resulted in some numbers being stolen, so they sent us new cards and cancelled the old ones (cancelled just a few days before). Now we are almost home, at the Halifax airport, with no other credit card and so no way - not even a cash deposit - to get our car to go those last few miles. So now the nice young girl there (Tanya) makes some calls, and finally reaches a regional supervisor and convinces that person that we are a good risk, so they agree that we can take the car, go through our mail (6 months worth) to find our new credit cards, activate them and then call Tanya with the new number so she can process the $60 charge.
Even as exhausted as we are, sitting here on Saturday night on our patio overlooking the LaHave River, we appreciate how lucky we are, and give a quiet extra "thanks" to those numerous nice people who helped us get here. Including Marlene for inviting us to stay here.
Time passes.
We have had a viciously busy time in Nova Scotia. Between taxes and visiting and Jacquie's store and a thousand (exaggeration) little chores around the mostly finished house. Highlights: seeing our friends and family again, especially at the wonderful party orchestrated by Bernadette (and her helper bees) and getting to see the now (mostly) finished house. Lowlights: the cold and the lack of warmth.
I was really a bit afraid that it would all seem too quiet to us now, but quiet is okay. (The town certainly seems pretty big - the other day I was out driving and I saw the taxi.) The day before we left I drove to town early in the morning. It was one of those perfect mornings - the river was a sheet of glass, and the rising sun was just starting to burn the mist off of the water. I passed an older man and his older dog just heading out for their morning walk, both of them obviously thrilled to be doing so. A strong reminder that I could also be very happy here.
The interesting thing about this visit was that it felt like the first time I really sat back and compared living in Koh Samui and living in Nova Scotia. Last year from the moment we made the decision and I said yes to the job I never gave it another thought - decision made. Of course I was now back in Nova Scotia with nothing to tie us to either place, and now with a grasp of what life is actually like living in Thailand. So of course reconnecting with our family and friends makes it hard to go, but then our life there makes it hard to stay. In the end, as our departure date approached we both started to get excited to be going back, which I figure is pretty telling . Plus we need a rest.
I'm writing this from the airplane, just entering Kazakstan airspace, heading for Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. For some reason we are going mostly east this time, for the first time (still far enough north to enjoy the summer long sunrise to the north. We miss the International Date Line, so it just keeps getting later and later. Next stop Bangkok - only about 6 hours to go - then home for a little hug from Sami.
We're here. Samui, Sami and sleep. I'll write more in a few weeks, when we wake up.
In my last issue I mentioned, "Our plane to New York leaves at almost midnight on the 20th" and that we would be back there on the 21st. Well, funny story - we actually discovered while standing in line to check in that the plane didn't leave at "almost midnight on the 20th" but rather "just a little after midnight on the 20th". This turned out to be an important distinction, as it meant that our plane had actually left Bangkok about 20 hours earlier - in the early morning of the 20th rather than late at night on the 20th.
The exceptionally nice young woman at the check in counter explained that unfortunately tonight's flight is seriously overbooked, and so while she would put us on the standby list she does not hold out much hope. The is no flight tomorrow, so the next flight leaves early Monday morning. She can not give us standby seats on that - so if tonight's standby doesn't work out we will need to call Aeroplan and rebook reward seats - not gonna happen - or buy full fare seats on that plane. In addition we have also of course missed our flight from New York to Halifax, and our rental car may or may not still be waiting for us in Halifax. AND if we do need to stay here until Sunday night we will have 2 more taxi rides and hope we can find a hotel with a room.
Luckily we got to the airport way early - Jacquie was finished at the decor show on Wednesday, so on Thursday we did some shopping and Friday was an extra day to kill with nothing to do but wait for our flight that left the night before. The reason this was lucky is that it gave us PLENTY of time to beat ourselves and each other up over our complete stupidity. So by the time it was time to go back to that nice young woman at the check in counter to find out if we could go tonight we were pretty much finished with doing so.
While giving us our boarding passes she explained how extremely lucky we are, and suggested that she thought we must be good people because we clearly must have good karma.
We ran to the gate where our flight is now boarding, got stuck in two long security lines, but the flight - that we were not booked on - waited for us (and I assume some other people, but we did appear to be last).
One of the disappointments discussed in detail during our wait was that we had spent 25,000 extra Aeroplan points EACH for business class seats and that our screw up will have ruined that. Well, no, it turned out we even got those seats. I am writing this from somewhere over the north pole while stretched out on my bed after a nice nights sleep. The seat/bed is fully electric with a lovely back massager. And right from the welcome champagne at boarding the service and food has been amazing.
We will be sending a letter to Thai Airways telling them about that nice young woman at the check in counter who we believe got us here and saved us a great deal of grief (caused entirely by our own stupidity).
From JFK in New York (where we arrived at 6:30 am) we took a $35 cab ride to La Guardia. The "sticker shock" has officially begun. At La Guardia we needed to go through the same process - convince Air Canada to honour yesterday's ticket. The woman at the counter did not want to help, but her superior was there and told her to say our connecting flight was late arriving (no kidding) so the ticket could be used - she did manage to charge us $30 for our suitcase being overweight, but that's a small price to pay. Four more hours to spare till our 1:00 pm flight to Halifax - then we'll see if Hertz still has a car there for us.
The rental car should be the easy part. It's fully pre-paid, we're just a day late picking it up. Well not so fast. They need to put a small ($60) hold on a credit card, as a security deposit in case we damage their car (since we are a day late, the piece of crap we rented is gone, so we get the free upgrade to a new Toyota Camry). But our credit cards are refused - a phone call later and we hear that a problem at Homesense / Winners resulted in some numbers being stolen, so they sent us new cards and cancelled the old ones (cancelled just a few days before). Now we are almost home, at the Halifax airport, with no other credit card and so no way - not even a cash deposit - to get our car to go those last few miles. So now the nice young girl there (Tanya) makes some calls, and finally reaches a regional supervisor and convinces that person that we are a good risk, so they agree that we can take the car, go through our mail (6 months worth) to find our new credit cards, activate them and then call Tanya with the new number so she can process the $60 charge.
Even as exhausted as we are, sitting here on Saturday night on our patio overlooking the LaHave River, we appreciate how lucky we are, and give a quiet extra "thanks" to those numerous nice people who helped us get here. Including Marlene for inviting us to stay here.
Time passes.
We have had a viciously busy time in Nova Scotia. Between taxes and visiting and Jacquie's store and a thousand (exaggeration) little chores around the mostly finished house. Highlights: seeing our friends and family again, especially at the wonderful party orchestrated by Bernadette (and her helper bees) and getting to see the now (mostly) finished house. Lowlights: the cold and the lack of warmth.
I was really a bit afraid that it would all seem too quiet to us now, but quiet is okay. (The town certainly seems pretty big - the other day I was out driving and I saw the taxi.) The day before we left I drove to town early in the morning. It was one of those perfect mornings - the river was a sheet of glass, and the rising sun was just starting to burn the mist off of the water. I passed an older man and his older dog just heading out for their morning walk, both of them obviously thrilled to be doing so. A strong reminder that I could also be very happy here.
The interesting thing about this visit was that it felt like the first time I really sat back and compared living in Koh Samui and living in Nova Scotia. Last year from the moment we made the decision and I said yes to the job I never gave it another thought - decision made. Of course I was now back in Nova Scotia with nothing to tie us to either place, and now with a grasp of what life is actually like living in Thailand. So of course reconnecting with our family and friends makes it hard to go, but then our life there makes it hard to stay. In the end, as our departure date approached we both started to get excited to be going back, which I figure is pretty telling . Plus we need a rest.
I'm writing this from the airplane, just entering Kazakstan airspace, heading for Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. For some reason we are going mostly east this time, for the first time (still far enough north to enjoy the summer long sunrise to the north. We miss the International Date Line, so it just keeps getting later and later. Next stop Bangkok - only about 6 hours to go - then home for a little hug from Sami.
We're here. Samui, Sami and sleep. I'll write more in a few weeks, when we wake up.
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