There are many unfortunate situations and many sad stories now. By telling my stories I by no means hope it will diminish the pain and suffering other people have been going through for the past six months.
As you know from my other blogs I am staying in a place in Southern Thailand called Khanom in the province of Nakhon Si Thammarat. It’s on the east coast directly opposite Phuket (west coast). Here you can see a map of Thailand with Khanom marked with the Google maps blue (I am here) dot, next to the heart.
I got to this place by accident. I was kicked out of Surathani province when they closed all the hotels. a taxi brought me here to this resort. At that time I was the only customer and through at least half the days of the week I am still the only customer. But since the country is beginning to relax regulations there are more days when there are customers staying here and also when the place is fully booked, almost all Thai tourists here for one night.
Recently I’ve been waking up between 5:30 and 6:30 which is a perfect time to get to the beach for a swim before the sun comes up. I’m doing the best I can to keep up 2 swims a day to lose weight. When I got to Thailand in March I weighed 84 kg and now I weigh 77 so the exercise and the diet, mostly not eating very much, is serving me well. (1 kg equals 2.2 pounds)
Since I don’t have a swimsuit I use a very tight bikini underwear which wasn’t really made for swimming but which is perfectly acceptable in Thailand. Many people can’t afford swimsuits so they just swim in their underwear if they go into any water deeper than their hips. I had three swimsuits but they all have seen better days and had problems that made them unusable.
After the 15 minutes to half hour swim I come back to the bungalow, wash the sand off my feet and sandals, take a shower and get ready for the events of the day.
Almost all the morning I spend on my private outside patio drinking coffee, reading email, Facebook and messenger communications and the news from a variety of countries and different new sources. Once I become thoroughly disgusted with all of the news I go on to manage other things before noon which could be finances, certain issues in the states or Japan or work on various projects such as the family digital museum. Many of the small family heirlooms were passed down to me since I am the oldest (excepting a older brother who pretty much said he divorced the family). So after giving everything to the next generation I decided to take all of those photos of photos and documents and PDFs of letters and books and share with everyone in the family.
One or more of those projects is normally finished before three or four so if it’s not raining it’s time to go shopping for dinner. If it is raining I might decide to go in the ocean for my second swim of the day. There is something unusually refreshing about swimming in the ocean with the cool raindrops falling on your head while in the warmer ocean waters feeling almost like a bathtub.
Normally I’ll buy food and then go for my second swim between 5:15 and 6pm when the sun is behind the palm trees and ready to go down. That keeps me from getting sunburned. By the way, a little bit of sun every day is good for the body but over time it’s all so bad for the skin.
Either way, before 6 I wind up having finished my second dive and having purchased food for dinner. Normally I go to the little food carts in the little city main street and buy things to be slightly heated in the microwave and get ready to eat. An important part of food in Thailand is the sauces. You can buy various kinds of sauces but the food vendors create these really exquisite sauces you can use as dips for what you buy. very often I buy rice with the meal, either sticky Rice if I’m going to eat little things that I dip in sauce or regular steamed rice if I’m going to put some curry or some soup or something else on top of the rice. Very often I add coconut milk to the rice and the curry to tone down the spices and create a more rounded flavor. This all melds together in the microwave. Are use the microwave since the food can cool slightly on the way back or from having been purchased earlier in the day.
While having dinner I watch some entertainment I made available to myself through some method or another. I can’t tell you what I watch or my sources. If I did I’d have to silence you.
After a couple hours of some kind of screen entertainment I go to sleep and wake up and start the next day.
The order of doing things during the day depends upon the weather and trying to stay away from the jellyfish, more prevalent after about 6 PM. And I’m not talking about land jellyfish. Those can be exceptionally disturbing, though not as powerful and are inspiring as the flying spaghetti monster.
In another blog I’ll talk about my finances during the day which will be very interesting to those on budget travel requirements. If you’re interested in this blog you can enter your email address on a blog page so a notification of the new blogs will appear in your email. I won’t use the email addresses for anything; I don’t even see them. And they are conglomerated by a open source program I added to my webpage. I don’t think anyone else would have access to that information.
In closing this writing today I feel lucky to be able to say my situation is a lot more fortunate then many other people. I wish everyone well and I hope you’re able to travel to interesting places safely as soon as possible.