A photo of my agenda

I am updating this at mid-day on Monday (6am in Europe).

6.30pm... I added text after the photo of my agenda. No more updates today, I'm going for a beer!

I thought I would post a photo below of my agenda for the week (I hope you can read it OK, the image is rather small on my laptop). I think the week will pass very rapidly! This morning I went to visit the house of Jim Thompson which is very near to my hotel. He was an American man, famous in Thailand, who came to live here after the Second World War. His cousins then set up a foundation but I will write more about him here later. After the tour, I had a coffee by the koi carp. Unlike Donald Trump, I didn't get to feed them!

At lunch time, I am joining another Meetup group. On Thursday, you can see my flight to Manila with Thai.
The hotel has a video running on the TV showing Talin Floating Market and it's not far, so I will go there tomorrow. I checked transport and the BTS Skytrain which starts at International Stadium by my hotel goes to Wonwan Yai which is the other end of the line. From there I can take a taxi to the market. I especially want to try out some of the food. Then on Tuesday evening there is a yoga class in the hotel which will please one friend of mine who is always telling me to do yoga! I would have preferred Zumba the following evening but it clashes with a meetup with the same group with which I had so much fun on my first night. I am very depressed about the state of affairs in Catalunya and I want to spend as little time there as possible before I go to Colombia on the 28th. Yes, I know, it is a bit crazy! Thailand, Philippines and then Colombia in the other direction in quick succession. So that leaves the 7 days over Christmas completely empty, just getting over jet-lag. So I have no idea what to do with that! I even thought about spending it in the UK but they get totally silly about Christmas, totally over the top. One great option would be Ukraine, then I really would escape Christmas because theirs is after the New Year. But I've only just come back from there.
I went to the meetup and there were about 10 of us, most were American. The venue was a huge food hall with a sales desk at the entrance where one bought a card to spend at all the outlets. The young girl asked me how much to load into the card but I only realised when we left that the card is returned for a refund of the balance in the card. I chose 300 baht and spent a little over 200.The photo shows the chef cooking my meal, just a simple prawns and rice with a few other things stirred in!

The group was meeting in an "outdoor" terrace but enclosed, if that makes sense. One guy made a living as a baker and he brought some of his cakes along as a gift. It gave me some ideas for my friend Nini in Colombia because she wants to do the same with her husband who is already a baker but he can't find any work.

Another guy was full of ideas of where to go in the evenings but since I covered that subject in the previous post, I won't explain what he was suggesting. You can just imagine it. And he had one or two ideas about things to do in the day. He had a strange looking bag with him which looked suspiciously like a rifle inside but in fact it was a golf club - he was going to the range to practice, so we joined him. How is this possible in the middle of Bangkok in this heat? It was of course a virtual golf range on the top floor of a building near by, and air-conditioned. This technology has been around for a while, one hits a ball into a projected image of the fairway - it is a net which absorbs the energy of the ball and a small tracking device calculates the trajectory of the ball. In some cases the balls are specially modified, even with a chip inside. I'm not sure if that was the case here. I knocked one or two balls with a 7 iron, two were not too bad bearing in mind I haven't played for a long time. The third, I hit off the toe of the club so that wasn't so brilliant.

I wanted to visit the Royal Palace but by now it was getting quite late, around 4pm. We asked the girl at the desk when the Palace closed and she answered 8pm. Wrong. It was 4pm and I don't know why I was so trusting because I made a futile tuk-tuk journey but it was fun, absorbing the sounds of the city.

A little about Jim Thompson...

He was born in 1906 in Greenville, USA. Towards the end of World War 2, he was working for what is now the CIA. He was posted to Thailand, the war was coming to an end, so he decided to make his home here. He asked his wife to join him but she decided not to. He was a skilled designer and architect and rapidly became well known for making a big contribution to the development of the country. He helped create what is now a thriving silk business for the country. With the money he earned, he built a house surrounded by one or two other buildings which is now a museum and foundation administered by his family through his brother. He had no children of his own. The guide said that he fell in love with Thailand but I don't think he re-married. The house is very beautiful, almost all of it built in wood.

Then, in March 1967, he disappeared without trace during a visit to the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and it remains to this day a mystery as to what happened. He just walked into the woods.