the latest

Tomorrow Mum, Em, and Cathie head off to Luang Prabang. Ji and I are off to school and Phet is (fina-freaking-ly) getting back from Bangladesh. Talked to Phet and he tells me he spent all his DSA buying gifts for us, so yay! (DSA = Daily Subsistence Allowance given by the UN when you are off on bidness outside of your home base town. Also known as LPF {Laptop Purchasing Funds} or MTHSNSC {Money That Helps Soothe Neglected Spouses and Children}).

There is a wild lightning storm crashing outside. We are all hoping that the crummy weather stays in Bangkok as we are all planning to spend the weekend in Chiang Mai, and there have been major floods there in the past few weeks. I've written to the guest house we reserved to make sure that their rooms aren't still, uh, wet. We'll see how it goes.

The ladies continue to impress me with their cheeriness and gift-buying skills. Mum and Cathie were out all day today - first off to the Jim Thompson house, and then at the AWESOME Big C, Thailand's Wal-Mart equivalent. I gave absolutely baffling instructions to Mum on how to get to the Big C: "Go to Chit Lom station, and then follow the exit to Gaysorn shopping centre, and then, uh, go outside to the main road that is, uh, what's the opposite of parallel? Um, it's like at right angles to the subway road? And there is the MBK centre across the street. I mean, no, the Zen centre is across the street. So, if you're looking across the street, you'll see the Big C. But actually you're already on that side, so I mean you'll be at the Big C and if you're at the Big C, you'll see Zen." It amazes me that she doesn't lose it and scream at times like that.

Two nights ago the fam got back from their trip to the beach at Hua Hin. On the good side, the possibly-sketchy resort I'd picked out off the Hua Hin tourism website turned out to be a hit. We'd been a little concerned because they'd sent us an email asking us to transfer money into their account to reserve the rooms and in this day and age of 'send money to troubled Nigerian bazillionaire and receive thousands of dollars in profits' I was a bit sceptical, but it ended up being completely legit.

They headed off on Thursday morning to the southern bus terminal in Bangkok which is - in case you're wondering - on the completely opposite side of town.

<<interrupted for 24 hours by power outage due to incredibly huge lightning storm>>

The bus to Hua Hin was not quite as classy as the longer-distance buses. The air con was not sufficient to actually cool the passengers, and there weren't any bus hostesses. The fam decided that on the way back they'd go by train...but sadly it wasn't much of an improvement. The train was hot, food was served only once on the ride (and as the gang figured the noodle lady would come 'round again, they passed on the one and only meal that was on offer), and the train got in an hour late. By the time they arrived, everyone was famished and Ji was running a high fever again. I got a taxi, took Ji home, got him into bed, dosed him with tylenol and wiped him down with a cool cloth, but the poor wee fellow was really in pain. Ji rarely fusses when he's sick aside from the usual bit of whining that everyone goes through, but this time he lay in bed and actually clutched his stomach while whimpering in agony. Poor guy.

Ji's doing much better after a 3 day rest and a whack of antibiotics. He went back to school today and joined in for his first-ever Tae Kwon Do class. He taught me how to punch and shout "Keeee-Yaaaah!" after school, so I think he's enjoying himself. He's a little on edge emotionally following the illness (or at least that's my current excuse, ha) and had a meltdown last night when we went out to dinner and didn't immediately pay attention to him when he demanded that we do so. Today I was running my extra-curricular multimedia club in the computer room after school and I let Ji hang out in my class while I worked. My grade 5s were playing with him for the first half hour, but he was by himself for the last 10 minutes. He came into the computer room at the end of my class and said, "Mum, I'm sorry. I made footprints all over your classroom wall." I said, "Well, show me what you did, please." He led me to my classroom, where we could see blue whiteboard-marker-dust footprints all along the bottom of the wall. Ji's first question: "Can I still have a popsicle after school?" My first answer: "No way in hell!" End result? Meltdown number two. Finally got him to calm down after saying if he didn't stop screaming there'd be no popsicles all week. Ah, the bliss of motherhood!

Oh yeah, I got an email reply from the Chiang Mai guesthouse today:

Subject: Chiang Mai is fine now!

Thank you very much for your email. Chiangmai is fine now!  The river come down already.  Please do not worry . Only the place near the river was flood but now everywhere is fine.

Everything in Chiangmai is going on well now .Please do not change your mind to not visit our city in this time. Chiangmai have many nice places to visit and we will so sad if you will miss to visit our city.

You can change to stay another place if you still worry about our place but all your rooms reservation will be on the upstair that still beautiful .

 Now our place is o.k. and we will  open the guesthouse tomorrow . All our rooms on the upstair is no problem and still beautiful .Only  rooms on the ground floor and our garden was flooded .

Hope to hear from you and have a nice day to you.

Guesthouse X team

I will go home now bye bye.

Um, it was looking good for awhile there. Paragraphs one through three were really quite reassuring. But then, when I scrolled down to paragraph four? Uh...we'll see about this whole heading north during the monsoon thingy. [Bangkok-4-October-2005]