Not, you will be sad to learn, the long overdue and heavily illustrated treatise on my most magnificent genitals; but a brief report on my dealings with Pattaya Immigration Department.

Yes, it’s that time of year where I become all worked up over having to extend my stay in this fine country on the basis that I am retired. A degree of stress was justified in earlier years as the system was chaotic and you could be lost for hours in a tangle of bureaucracy and sweaty foreigners; only to be rejected and told to return the following day to repeat the process. Recently however, my handling of the process and the working of Immigration have both improved significantly; such that I was significantly more relaxed than usual when I decided to do the deed yesterday.

The back area of our house contains what my wife describes as a “Thai kitchen”; which means it is somewhere she can go to cook things that would produce cat-killing fumes if performed inside the house.

Yesterday she came rushing in from her Thai kitchen in a state of some panic, demanding that I come and confront a home invasion that was taking place at the rear of the property. I hoped for a large snake, I got this:

Time for another road trip; prompted again by she who must be obeyed finding a photo of something on the wide wide world of web and asking “shall we go there?” I always answer “yes”, and then she finds out that the location is in Croatia which is a little far and we forget about it. But this time it was a temple in Phetchabun, so off we went.

Eschewing cross-country shenanigans, we drove to Bangkok, took route 9, then route 1, before heading due north on the 21. What a fine road. Dual carriage-way, light traffic and a central reservation awash with colourful flowers and trimmed bushes. Nothing like kilometres of trimmed bushes to lift your mood. Finally we arrived at route 12 which will be a massively impressive mega-lane motorway through the mountains when it is completed sometime in the next century; but for now it is a single track nightmare which had to be carefully negotiated before we arrived at our hotel.

2015-02-11 | ChristianPFC says

Where was this picture taken (didn’t find this information in EXIF on flickr)?

2015-02-11 | Spike says

That’s because it’s not there. Wait till the next post on Wat Pha Sorn Kaew; or look it up on Google maps.

2015-02-14 | ChristianPFC says

How can a polished stainless steel globe show the mirror image of something that is behind it? Same for 2015_02_wat-pha-sorn-kaew