Ayuttaya Finally!

Since the last time I posted a message a lot has happened. At work the Mongolia SNAP workspace has been completed and the invitations sent away. Now we’ll see if it is actually used. The project proposal for the online MDG campaign which I’ve been developing with Julien has been submitted. Again, it will be interesting to see their reaction. A major project at the moment which I am contributing to is a CD Lessons Learned Workshop being held at the end of April. Lot’s of time is being devoted to this and Heidi deserves a tremendous amount of credit for putting all of this together in addition to her already heavy workload. I don’t know how she does it.

Outside of work Britton arrived from Toronto and stayed with me for a little while. We went to Koh Samet but although Koh Samet is nice I really would like to see some other parts of Thailand, especially Koh Samui. I will certainly try and find time to do this in the near future. Now Britton has been in the South of Thailand, I believe with a friend of his from Queen’s. Not sure when he will be returning to pick up some of the stuff he left behind.

I finally went to Ayuttaya! The old capital was a nice day trip out of the busy city. Because the area we had to cover was large we rented scooters for the day. That was kind of exciting as I had never driven a scooter before and never driven period outside of Canada.

Lots of interesting temples to see.

Coming up:

Songkran festival is coming up which is a really big holiday for Thai’s. For a few days everyone throws water at each other. I’m not sure to what extent this really happens but I’ve been told that you cannot expect to walk anywhere without getting wet so I shouldn’t carry anything important.

Also I’ve decided to stay on volunteering for an additional 3 months. The experience here I feel is immeasurable and I’m not really ready to go back to Canada yet. Not having found a job after this also contributes to this decision. What remains to be seen though is what I will be doing for those three extra months. I’m moving from my current apartment to a much cheaper one and have reworked my budget accordingly to maximize the amount of time I can stay here with as little money as possible. One lessons learned from the past 6 months (something the UN is always keen on knowing): Always budget assuming the worst scenario, even if you are led to believe the best scenario.

From Bangkok,

Andrew

P.S. If you want to get a sense of what Bangkok is like at night the video below is a good taste.