200,000

Another milestone has been reached on the Werewolf’s Lair blog.  Yesterday the all-time number of hits reached 200,000. 

I thought I’d show you a little bit of “inside the numbers”.

Originally my plan was to wait until tomorrow so that I could show you February’s numbers complete, but because I’m moving house, I may not have internet access on Saturday the 1st.  Figuring that there’s no one out there who’s likely to care whether you see the full month or not, I have decided to be flexible (difficult for us anal retentive types) and write the blog today.

My 2005 holiday – part 1

In 2005 I came to Thailand for the first time. I came on a holiday that lasted for several weeks, from April to June, and saw me visit Bangkok, Laos and Cambodia.

As hard as it may be to imagine, I didn’t know anything about the naughty nightlife of Bangkok before I came here. Until I spent some time on the internet ahead of my trip, I didn’t know anything about Thailand at all.

During my holiday I sent daily reports to my friends & family via email — a sort of private blog. Given the audience, I didn’t really write much about the P4P scene, but focused on the ‘normal’ tourist stuff that I did.

It occurred to me that it might be interesting for me, and hopefully you as well, to post extracts from those holidays. My plan is to post a series of blogs over several weeks made up of those writings. I may at times interject comments on the original diary entries from my perspective 3 years later.

This is the first of the series… I hope you enjoy it!

Thailand’s deposed Prime Minister has returned

  

Thaksin Shiniwatra has an interesting resume that includes:

• working as a police officer
• working as a mobile phone service salesman
• developing Thailand’s largest mobile company and turning it into a major conglomerate
• becoming a multi-billionaire — Thailand’s richest — and rich even by world standards
• elected, then re-elected to be Prime Minister of Thailand
• deposed from office by a controversial, but bloodless, military coup
• new owner of the Manchester City Football (Soccer) Club

He hasn’t been in Thailand for a year and a half (since September 2006) but he returned today, landing at Suvarnabumi airport and kissing the ground, before going to the Supreme Court to start the process of defending himself against charges of criminal corruption.

Suan Lum

My first permanent home in Thailand was in Lumpini. For my first full year in Bangkok I lived in the Lumpini Park View Condominium on Rama 4 Road, caddy-corner to Lumpini Park, shouting distance from the Lumpini Muey Thai Boxing Stadium and directly across the street from the Suan Lum Night Bazzar.

The picture you see above would have been taken from a position near the MRT train station entrance, which is just meters away from the night bazaar.

My new shoes

Part 1: Getting exactly what you wanted

On a Friday two or three weeks ago I went walking through Central World Shopping Center. Basically I was killing time because I was about an hour early for an appointment.

I wandered into a very nice Japanese department store and was looking around. I noticed that they were running a good sale on shoes, with some brand names that I recognized. I decided to ask if they had my size.

It’s generally very frustrating for me here in Thailand. I wear a size 45, but normally the largest size shoe that is sold in Thai shops is a 44. Just a shade too small.

Zen Finance

 

Pictured above: The wheel of the law. The eight spokes represent the eightfold path.

Loaning money to a Thai girl 

In early February I made a financial arrangement with a Thai girl I know. We’ve been friends for as long as I have been living in Bangkok (I moved here on a Sunday in September 2005 and met her on Friday — five days later).  She’s a ‘good’ Thai Girl (commonly abbreviated as GTG on the internet), meaning that she doesn’t work as a bar girl.

Around new year she started a new job, and cash got a bit tight for her, and she borrowed money from me at a rate of 1,000 baht per week, and repaid some of it mid-month. By the end of the month her outstanding debt stood at 2,500 baht.

The government’s latest crisis

News reports today are all bad for the government, but maybe good for your currency exchange rates. I have pieced together a news report below by pasting several different articles from the Bangkok Post into one longer report.

The short version is that the Speaker of the House has been found guilty of electoral fraud by the Election Commission, and will face charges in the Supreme Court. The fears of this leading to the dissolution of the PPP (ruling party) and the toppling of the current elected government caused the stock market to drop sharply this morning, and the Prime Minister to call for emergency meetings.

All of this seems to overshadow the otherwise interesting but unconfirmed reports that former-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra will arrive back in Bangkok on Thursday morning at 9:00 a.m. It would be the first time he has been in Thailand since being overthrown in a bloodless military coup in September 2006.

The Post Forum, a major media event designed to allow the government to outline it’s plans and policies this week, has become almost a footnote in the wake of the EC ruling. After all, why would you worry much about policy announcements from a government that could disappear next week?

EC finds Yongyuth guilty of electoral fraud charge

(BangkokPost.com) – Election Commission (EC) on Tuesday found House Speaker Yongyuth Tiyapairat guilty of electoral fraud charge in the Dec 23 general election.

The five-member panel voted 3-2 to red-card him, according to Election Commissioner Somchai Juengprasert.

“The majority voters decided to forward the case to the Supreme Court within 15 days,” he said. “If the court agrees to hear the case, Mr Yongyuth must stop performing his duties in parliament.”

He added that the Supreme Court will decide on the case, and Mr Yongyuth will be banned from politics for five years if the court upholds the EC’s ruling.

If convicted Mr Yongyuth could be stripped of his seat in parliament.

Coming Attractions

I’m not planning on writing anything useful in this blog at all.

I just want to foreshadow some of the things that I plan to write about this week and next: