Well, I suppose it’s about that time again…

Hello everyone, how are you? Good? I hope so. I’m ok. I know it’s been a while, I guess the arse is just falling out of my desire to keep you updated on things. It’s not you, it’s me. To be blunt. Sorry, now I’m making it look like I can’t even be bothered to apologise properly.

March

March we went to Koh Surin which looked like this:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2511779&l=cb081&id=553525293

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2511785&l=f5f35&id=553525293

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2511791&l=80269&id=553525293

It’s a pretty small place, it’s in a nature reserve, but it’s pretty special. We went with one of Looksorn’s (genuine) friends and her brother, and we got there by public bus in the end, which was an experience. A good 12 hour ride overnight, it’s something I hope I’ll never have to do again. I never knew it was possible to ‘drift’ a bus round corners… well actually I still don’t, but evidently after enough M-150 and illegal speed pills most bus drivers think it’s worth trying at 3 in the morning with 30-odd passengers. Once we were there though, we were in for a very different experience to Bangkok.

Because it’s so small and a nature reserve, there are only about 12 bungalows. Most people (ie us) sleep in tents on the beach. Romantic as it sounds, it’s actually pretty uncomfortable since there’s nothing except the bottom of the tent between you and the ground. Due to it being a very small island with a limited electricity supply and nothing to do, you’re usually in bed by 9pm and up at sunrise, which is actually, dare I say it, nice after a couple of days.

During the day, you can book snorkelling tours, you get taken out by some local sea gypsies and left to swim around for a bit checking out all the underwater life, which is amazing. I don’t think I’d ever seen ‘wild’ fish swimming around their natural habitat before. The experience exceeded my expectations. I think doing it a couple of times though, it is pretty tiring having your mask pressing so hard it threatens to break your nose and constantly getting full of mucus. Of course when you’re not snorkelling , you’re usually eating. This is Thailand after all. And of course, being on a small island you’re usually eating lots of fresh seafood, which is great until you need the toilet. The creepy, infested-with-giant-jungle-spiders, non-flushing toilet. Use at your own risk (of losing your life to those giant fuckers). Looksorn and I also found time to walk along the island’s nature trail, which while scenic with lots of tiny idyllic coves and beaches, was also exhausting and pretty heavy going in places. My new flip-flops certainly enjoyed taking every opportunity to fall apart on every single log.

I think the couple of nights we spent there was definitely enough. I mean the place looks nice but all that sand, the animals, the sea water… you miss the comforts of home, such as matresses for example, and toilets where you don’t feel like you’re being stalked by jungle predators, of course. The journey back was fairly unexciting, meaning I don’t remember a whole lot about it, and it was back to work pretty soon.

As for other things in March… well it’s a pretty long time ago now (seriously this blog’s taken me about 3 weeks to write so far and I haven’t exactly been planning what I want to say in advance. Piss poor, I know. You want better, more frequent updates? I need some financial incentives! lol! Obviously I don’t really expect them… because you’re all stingy). I’m pretty sure March was the month I went to see Sebastian Leger at Bed Supperclub. I’ve drifted a very long way from the club scene and only have a vaguely tangible grasp of modern house music, and as I get older I find my tastes getting more individual, so it was with a sense of relief that I made my quarterly apprearance at a music venue to find that yes, I do still actually like house music. You hear a lot of people bandying around all sorts of crap about house music these days, so it was nice to actually listen to some first hand. Seb Leger himself was very good. The venue was sparsely attended since it was mid-week, the entrance fee phenomenal, but it was a night of bloody good music. He managed to drop about half of Daft Punk’s Homework, needless to say they were the only tunes I recognised! The night ended early, and upon exiting we found that while the years may have moved on, Bangkok’s nightlife consists of the same bizarre mix of rediculous people it always did. Most reassuring.

The rest of March was… well, probably boring. Like I said already, it’s a while ago now. Work, well, you can guess.

April

April was again a fairly slow month. There were intermittent holiday classes (which also happened in March actually. I can’t be arsed to edit it now. Oh well), although nothing on the scale of last year. There were only 2 classes, both in the afternoon, both with about 5 kids in each. Always going downhill without ever hitting the bottom. That’s ECC! As could be predicted, they started off ok for about a week and then things really went tits up. The thin, inappropriate text books ran out of useful activities, ECC had even less games that the year before since the ones we used last year actually belonged to Vincent, who is no longer with us (he’s gone to Sarasas now apparently). Oh well, a small price to pay.

Of course, as with every year the focus of April is Songkran. This year we managed to organise absolutely nothing. People always bang on about how Bangkok is completely empty at Songkran, so I was interested to see that if nothing else. Turns out that’s a complete lie, all that happens is that the traffic goes from ‘a vision of purest Hell’ to ‘a bit busy’. I guess a small difference is better than no difference though. Looksorn managed to dig out a couple of discounted tickets for a new resort in Pranburi which we booked for a couple of days at the end of Songkran, but other than that we had no real plans. We went to the city pillar on the 12th, which is a temple not really designed for tourists (in case you’re thinking of visiting) but nice all the same.

As with every Songkran, I started off really not looking forward to it, and then as time went on gradually got this nervous feeling that I was really missing out on something. Unfortunately, Looksorn came down with a pretty bad stomach bug for the first couple of days, so we just stayed at home doing as little as possible.

We got pretty heavily disturbed on the 14th by our next door neighbour who felt that the only way to celebrate Songkran was to go out, get hammered then bring all his drunk friends back to his apartment to have a really ‘wild’ (in the sarcastic sense) party in his room. Sod the fact it’s Songkran, there’s plenty of after-hours places open, and sod the fact you live in an apartment block with hundreds of other people, of course you should have a really loud party in your room at 1 in the morning! Of course you fucking should!

I eventually went round at 2 and knocked on the door, which was in fact still open. From the other side of the door I could hear his inebriated girlfriend: “Who’s that?!” in that tone of voice that suspected I was clearly some sort of psychopath intent on destroying both them and their fun. A few knocks later and the terrified party-goers, whispering in slurring drunken tones finally summed up the courage to answer the door. My neighbour came to the door. A tall English guy, who looked about my age, maybe a bit older. His room looked like something from a students’ hall of residence. It seemed a fairly odd dichotomy to me. The guy always dresses fairly smart, seems to have a fairly active life out here – he’s a teacher by the looks of things, and seems to have some sort of side project on the go as well, as well as a Thai girlfriend. So I was suprised to see a room that didn’t match that level of maturity; the bathroom was covered in photos of past friends and adventures, bottles of spirits and beer were everywhere. Something about the room seemed oddly comfortable and tidy though – in stark contrast to my own. Was I envious? Probably. Anyway, he answered the door, and I tried my best to seem angry-but-civil and all grown up, only to be drowned out by a torrent of drunken “ok mate, yeah mate, yeah, no, yeah, no, yeah that’s right, yeah no sorry mate, no ok, yeah mate sorry, no, yeah”. I hoped the image of me and the sentiment of what I had said stuck anyway though. I returned triumphantly to my room and for 15 minutes there was silence. Then the music and the voices started again louder than before. Finally Looksorn elected to call the reception and get the security guards up to make them all fuck off. Of course by the time the security guard had been woken up and travelled up to our floor, the party was over and the friends had all disappeared anyway.

On the 15th, when Songkran is always in full swing, we went outside to grab some street food and a whole load of alcohol to drown our sorrows in. Lokosorn was still a little tender, and I wasn’t feeling too wonderful, but we went back to out apartment and I started drinking. After a couple of large Asahi’s, things took a turn for the worse. I felt seriously ill. I couldn’t stand up. Dizzy and sweating I clung to the bed. It was about 1am now. Clearly in attempt to trump his behaviour from the night before, our neighbour returned again. Now he and his girlfriend have a reputation for rather noisy love-making in our apartment block- to the point that there’s actually a notice downstairs that now tells people to refrain from “getting horny” after 10pm. A sign of how obliviously self-interested those two are, they appear to have failed to notice who that notice is directed at. So they returned. Slow music started playing, from the other side of the walls, soft moaning could be heard, gradually getting louder and louder. I felt a movement in my bowels. It too was growing. With a sense of bewildered urgency I ran for the toilet and (please turn away now if you are of a weak disposition) vomited violently from my anus, to the sound of wild orgasm and love music.

I don’t think I’ve felt that low in a long, long time.

It got worse later – my illness that is, not next door, they finished pretty soon after that – I was actually sick which I haven’t been for longer than I can remember, years now. The last time I was sick from anything was that time in the second year at uni I got so drunk I passed out for 2 hours in the toilet of Casbah and almost got locked in for the night. As for being genuinely ill, I have no idea.

So not a great Songkran so far, huh? Well, it got better. Glad to flee from the horrors of Bangkok, me and Looksorn made our way to Pranburi, to the new resort La a natu (er.. yeah I don’t know how to say that either) which not only was just about the best place in the world to recover from being ill, it’s also just about the best place in the world anyway. Here’s the website: http://www.laanatu.com/ It’s just plain lovely, and it was almost enough to cure my ailments by itself. But not quite unfortunately. I finally gave in and went to see a doctor when we came back home and B2000 later (and an overnight stay narrowly avoided… think how much that would’ve cost!) I had enough drugs to fix me right up.

And from then on for the rest of April it was a case of being broke (further compounded by miscalculating my 90 days notification at Immigration and being fined another B2000) and working intermittently. Which fuelled my feeling of misery and need to escape to a better life somewhere else. Things have turned slightly more positive since then though, more on that next time.

One last thing for April I guess, I think my last heads-up on Looksorn’s university plans was that we were probably going to be ready to come home by May… well, obviously not since I’m still in Thailand, but we’re nearly there. We’ve got the course sorted, it’s just a case of tying up the visa and we’ll be ready to go. It’s looking like July now, but that’s a pretty definite July.

So there you have it. Another gargantuan blog covering the months of March-April 2008. Maybe I’ll get round to doing May a bit more on time? Who knows?

See you round. Please feel free to bombard me with more unsubstantiated abuse, I live off that stuff!

Mat