We have been here about 10 months so far. I love it, Sim misses the U.S. I miss it too, but not as much as Sim. What follows, in no certain order or categorical order are things to love and things to hate about living in Thailand. It may sound a bit negative at times but it just takes a bit of patience and a “C'est la vie” attitude and overall, I do like it here.

The Weather
You gotta love the weather most of the year. We are just 8 degrees north of the equator, so the temperature is fairly constant all year long. There are just really 2 seasons here. April to September is the 'low' or summer season here. The southwest monsoons are blowing in and it is more stormy. April and May are the hottest months in Phuket with temperatures ranging from 80 to 95 degrees. April to September also bring lots of rain. May though November brings lots of rain, but usually in the form of heavy but brief downpours that tend to cool things off a bit, although it remains quite humid during these months. This is probably the only time we use our air conditioner. And even then we only use it at night when sleeping. Along with the storms in May-Nov, come the waves at the beach, so for surfers it is great, but for tourists here in the off season with little local knowledge of the water and conditions, it can be deadly. About 20 tourists drowned last year here.

November through March is the 'high' season. The cooler Northeast monsoons blow during this time. The wind is now offshore instead of onshore. Temperatures range from 75 to 89 degrees. Rain is infrequent. There are no waves at the beach. The water is crystal clear. With the 'high season' come all the tourists so the beaches get really crowded. Actually the very best part of the year for me is September, October and November, just before 'high' season starts. The storms become less frequent, the weather gets a bit cooler and the crowds of tourists have not arrived yet. Overall you can't beat the weather any time of year. No snow, no freezing nights, no bitter cold winds, and no tornadoes. Except for the 2004 tsunami a few years back, there has been very very few natural disasters in this part of the world.

The Food
In one word: Spicy. The people of southern Thailand like it hot, so when eating out if you don't like it spicy, you need to tell the waitress, “pet farang”, or make it not too spicy for this foreigner. Your choices for food are somewhat limited here. But since this is an international tourist destination, and you have plenty of money, you can get anything you want. But shopping in the local markets you will find limited choices of the things you may be used to eating in the US.

Fruit Lots and lots of new fruit to taste and enjoy. Papaya, Phuket Pineapple, dozens of varieties of Mango. Mangosteen, the queen of fruits, will give you some really good antioxidants. Lychee, Rambutan, Longan, Longong, Pomelo, Pomegranate and a dozen variety of Bananas. Oranges that are more like Tangerines, Watermelon, Apples, Pears, Dragon Fruit and of course Durian, the King of fruits. What you don't see in the regular markets are berries, Peaches, and Plums. You can get them at the specialty markets like Villa Market here on Phuket and in Bangkok, but be prepared to pay $5-7 for a basket of Blueberries. In fact Villa Market has, or can get anything you want, from Beluga Caviar to grass fed Australia beef.

Vegetables – Dark green leafy vegetables are here. Sim gets our lettuce from an organic grower just down the street. In the market, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and jicama are plentiful. Squash, eggplant, potatoes, celery, cilantro, beets, ginger, galanga and other roots veggies like daikon can be found as well. Then there are lots of “local” greens available although I have no idea what they are. Sim cooks them and I eat them however. Sim's brother sometimes heads up into the hills and comes back with the tops of a local green plant for Sim.

Meat – Beef, Chicken, Pork and Fish are the staple meats here. We eat mostly Chicken and Fish, with some barbecued pork that we get from the street vendors. I want to get a real bar-b-que but Sim wants to wait until we get into our house. So the chicken and fish is usually fried or steamed.

The Recreation
Phuket has lots of different outlets for recreation. There are of course all the water related activities. Water skiing, windsurfing, kite surfing, board surfing, sailing, fishing and general fun on boats. I had a chance to go the the annual Boat Show here in Phuket this past January. They had about 50 boats in the water and the usual equipment manufacturer booths set up inside a convention center type of building. Unfortunately you had to make an appointment to go on some of the larger yachts, but I did get to see some really nice boats. The least expensive boat in the water was a cute little $50K Chris Craft runabout. Besides water sports we also have half a dozen championship golf courses, bungee jumping, mountain biking and jungle trekking. So there are plenty of activities to occupy your time.

The Housing
We are renting now until it is the right time for us to build. When is the right time to build? When we sell the house in Costa Mesa, but determining that is a guess. Our luck has been terrible as far as timing goes. We started our 2 year RV adventure with RV prices high and gas prices low and ended our adventure with RV prices at rock bottom and gas prices at an all time high. So who knows. I guess we will just do it when it feels right. Sim is ready now, and I am getting more ready every day. We had the a guy from the land office out to the land last week and we found two of the four corners for sure with positive ID on the markers and a good idea of where the other two are. Eventually we will have to have an 'official' survey, but in the meantime we can at least start on a road and some land fill that needs to be done. We have a good rental rate now in our 3 br 2 ba tract home. Rental rates run in the range of $350 to$3000/mo.

- Utilities (Water, Electric, Sewer, Phone (landline and cell)) I told you about our water getting shut off for two days a couple months ago. Well it happened again just this week. This time it was off for only 24 hours, but it was so inconvenient. Showers at a friends house and toilet tanks being filled from 5 gal bottles. We are on a private well, so there is no calling the municipal government to find out what is going on. No problems with Sewer yet. Keeping fingers crossed.

The electricity goes out once a month almost like clockwork. It is usually out for only a short time. By the time we find the candles and the matches in the dark and get them lit, it comes back on. More frequently it just goes out for a second or two.

Now phone service is not bad, although I just saw a piece in the Phuket Gazette where a woman had been waiting for 3 years for a landline and the phone company said it may be another 2 years before she could get a line. She must be really out in the sticks somewhere. Cell service is not bad, although Sim's CDMA service with CAT seems to be marginal sometimes. She also has had a issue with every bill she has received. This month the bill arrived in the mail 1 day after the due date. She had some charges that were not detailed on the bill so she called and sent them an email asking for the detail on the charges but, so far has not heard back from CAT.

Internet service from TOT has gotten a bit better since the first couple of months with every other day outages. It only goes down a couple times a month now.

The Roads and Driving
You probably know already that they drive on the left here rather than on the right. So the wheel is on the right side of the car. Sim and I still to this day find ourselves on the wrong side of the car after shopping or going somewhere. We have a stick shift truck so I had to learn how to shift with my left hand and I still turn on the windshield wipers occasionally when I really want the turn signal.

The roads here are for the most part small. The 4 or so main roads running north and south and east and west are two lanes in each direction and do have shoulders. However if you get off one of those you find yourself on a one lane road or a road that is just wide enough for two cars to pass. No shoulders at all and people tend to put there houses right out to the street. If there is a sidewalk, you can't really walk it because someone will have put out planters or a cafe will fill the sidewalk with tables and chairs or in some cases just use the sidewalk as part of their restaurant.

- Driving Driving is an adventure. No one seems to obey any of the rules of the road except for traffic lights and that is just barely. People are always running the yellow at the last minute and the motorcycles always blast off 1 or 2 seconds before the green especially at the lights that have the digital countdown clocks. Cars are always speeding and no one obeys the speed limits, no passing lines/zones, lane markers or stop signs. Motorcycles are even worse. They pass you on the left, on the right. They all jump to the head of the line at a light. So if you are on a main road, now you have to pass all of them again. They also love going down the street on the wrong side. Sometimes they are just too lazy to move over to the left side, other times they just use it as a short cut to their destination. If you don't take a “I don't care” attitude and resist trying to drive that way yourself, you may find a little road rage creeping into your car. Last week a German expat was cut off by a motorcycle going the wrong way in a traffic circle. He got really angry and followed the motorcycle and it three riders. Eventually they stopped. An argument ensued and purportedly the German assaulted one of the men. A fight between the German and Thai guys ended up with the German getting stabbed to death.

Health Care
They don't really have Doctors in doctors offices per se. They do have some small clinics in the towns where people can go for cuts and minor things. Most people however go directly to the hospital when they are sick. I have a couple of hospital stories. I usually have my blood tested about every 3 or 4 months, so I have had it tested here twice so far. We go to Vichara Hospital, which is a government run hospital. Lots of people use this hospital because of the low cost. Now Sim happens to have a friend who is an RN at the hospital so she calls her when we go in for my blood test. At the hospital there are long lines for every station you have to visit. First you have to wait to check in. Then you have to wait to speak with a Nurse about what you need or what your problem is. Then wait for the blood draw, then wait for results. This entire process can take several hours. Sim's friend meets us when we arrive at the hospital and pretty much takes us to the head of all the lines, then calls us to give us the results, so the process is fairly painless. Last time we were there Sim's friend actually drew my blood for me and I just walked down to the lab and turned it in.

Now remember at the beginning of this journal I said that nothing significant happened in January? Well the last day of the month I had to go to the Hospital. I was out on my morning walk as usual in the morning. I usually walk the same route everyday and today was no different. I was about a mile from completing my walk when I passed a spot on the side of the road that I look at every time I go by. There is a dead branch from a tree that sort of sticks straight out into the road. It is covered with a vine that grows like a weed here. I have thought that it was kind of dangerous to be sticking out in the road like that and thought on more than one occasion of pushing it back or pulling it down out of the way. Well, today without thinking I grabbed it and pushed it back out of the way. I did not see the giant wasp hive hanging from the branch hidden by the vine. As soon as I disturbed the branch, the wasps came at me. After the first one stung me I realized what was happening and took off running down the road flailing my arms and legs like a wild man swatting at the wasps attacking me. One Thai guy stopped his car after seeing me and helped get the wasps off my back that I could not reach. I ended up getting stung over a dozen times on my legs, arms and torso. I am lucky that I am not allergic to stings. I made it home but was in severe distress the rest of the day, which brings me to another hospital story. Finally in the afternoon I could not take the pain any longer and Sim's brother took me to the hospital. Unfortunately, Sim's friend was not working this day so we had to wait like everyone else. I could not sit still and the only way I could keep my mind off the pain was to move, so while I paced the waiting area, Sim dealt with the Hospital. They directed us to Emergency and after the nurse took my blood pressure, they put me on a gurney and wheeled me into Emergency. I finally saw a Doctor and Sim told him the story. He listened to my chest, even after we told him and the nurse that I was not having any trouble breathing. All I wanted was something for the pain like Ibuprofen, and some Lidocaine to numb the bite area. Well after Sim told him the meds I am taking for my CHF, he did not want to prescribe anything. We did leave with a tube of Lidocaine. By the time we got home I had a generous slather of Lidocaine on my body, and I took 3 aspirin the minute we got home. By the next day the pain had subsided, but it took another full day to start feeling better.

That is it for January.

AYUDHAYA: Tourists have been flocking to a temple in the old capital district to get close to a group of tame frogs that have taken up residence in a lotus pond.

The frogs sit happily on lotus leaves, allowing tourists to stroke and play with them. They even allow photos to be taken, free-of-charge.

Phrakhrupradit Kijjarak, 46, the abbot of Wat Rachpraditthan in Phra Nakhon Sri Ayudhaya District, said the temple's frog community started out with two baby golden frogs that appeared in the lotus pond around the end of Buddhist lent in October. As the frogs grew, more and more of the little amphibians came to live in the pool. By the time news of the tame frogs broke on December 22, there were nine of them living in the pool.

Monks began to feed the frogs fish food. Soon, the frogs became used to the rhythms of temple life and whenever people played music the frogs would come and sit on the edge of the pond to listen and croak along, Phrakhrupradit said.

When monks come to feed them, they sit patiently on the lotus leaves to wait for their fish pellets. The abbot added that he thought the frogs had felt safe and happy in the temple pond and so invited their friends to come and live there too. Now it is as if the frogs are temple students, Phrakhrupradit said.

The day after the story of the frogs was published in the Thai press, around 500 tourists came to pet the animals. Word seems to have reached Ayudhaya’s amphibian community as well: the following day the flock of frogs had grown to 12.

Surapha Prachusap, a teacher from Lopburi who brought her students to see the frogs, said they were incredibly tame. Mrs Surapha added that she believes the frogs feel happy and content as Thai temples are known for providing shelter to animals.

Phrakhrupradit said if the number of frogs keeps growing, the temple will have to extend the lotus pond so they will all have room to live.