LEtsGO
Checking out the LEGO ripoffs…
I saw LEGO only once alongside a bigger selection of LEGO ripoffs in one department store. Otherwise, Enlighten, COGO, Megabloks and the crowd dominate the market here.
The Enlighten sets look really good though, some sets are clear copies of old LEGO sets, others are only inspired by original sets but quite nice on their own. But, take a look at the faces!
Bought a small set to test the quality. I have to say, it’s quite good. Also, Enlighten boasts this military themed series named “Combat Zone”:
Then there is Megabloks. They have this World of WarCraft series, quite impressive, check this out:
COGO on the other hand already looks shitty on the box art and as far as the quality is concerned, the new pieces don’t even fit together properly. At least the pieces from the one completely built set they displayed in the store.
Gasolina
Here are some pictures of some less common gasoline stations. But still they can be seen here and there. Thailand shows that the gasoline business might not have to be a monopoly.
Imagine, what if it were common in Germany that bakeries also sell gasoline? Would it be weird? No, if it was common, it would be common, it’s just a matter of what we learnt to consider normal.
In other countries, there are no bakeries at all and people buy plastic-packaged single slices of toast readily smeared with sweetened “butter” like bags of crisps in the next 7-Eleven (yes okay, talking about Thailand here ;-).
On Ko Mak. I absolutely love this photo, note all the little details: You can get GASOLINE (alternatively G ZOLINE) or DESAL here. There is a map of Ko Mak, making the shed almost look like the tools workshop in OpenClonk in it’s clunkyness. Also note the lovely hand-pumps(?), I gather. And of course, can’t be without, a photo of the king in the living room slash front porch area.
In Ayutthaya. A fuel pump in the format of a cash machine, quite cute. Though, I have to add, I am not sure if this isn’t from a major fuel company here in Thailand.
Fuel in bottles sold at 30 baht each at a snack shop – for motorcycles. I thought gasoline would be yellowish… What kind of stuff is that?
Another one of these tiny fuel pumps. Oh, pardon me, it’s just a telephone cell. I would have said that they are a dying species, but this is wrong, they are still around every corner here. They are just not really used anymore, never saw anyone using it.
Flooded
Lena left for Bangkok today and we will meet up for the second part of our beach holiday on this Friday as the students have midterm tests so there will be no classes the next week.
Now that I am writing this (not now that I am posting this, I wrote this day before yesterday), it has been raining for 20 hours almost without pause. Speed boats going to the island are cancelled for today because of heavy winds. Lena sent me by sms that on her way back to Bangkok (I am staying here for a few more days), that some towns are knee-deep in water with sand sack barriers in front of shops and that the traffic advanced only at walking-pace at times. She even saw a boat on a road.
It surprised me how fast the towns are flooded in Thailand during the rainy season. A full day of rain can still be considered as normal here, still already a few hours of rain is enough to fill the canalisation so that water starts to flood the streets. Specifically, I am talking about the university campus and Golf View in Rangsit, not about Ko Mak. These are definitely urban and quite newly-built areas. Instead of a proper canalisation to the nearby canal, there are people employed at Golf View who remove the water from the streets after the rain is over with buckets.
But well, after all (at least) the Bangkok area of Thailand is built on top of swamps. It can very well be no matter how good the canalisation system, the water level is already so high that there is simply no place where the water can flow away to, I can not judge that.
You know the traditional Thai houses? Traditional Thai houses are wooden houses built on stilts, the ground floor only serves as a garage, workshop and all-purpose area. Living room, kitchen, sleeping areas etc. thus are all in the first floor. Now I know why.
Beach Holidays
It took me three weeks to finally visit one of the many islands in Thailand.
Lena has quite a unfortunate class schedule this semester, she has only 14-something hours to teach, but her lessons are scattered all over the week in a way that she doesn’t have more than two days off in a row as she has to get to Bangkok center for a class on Saturday.
So far I didn’t really want to visit all the “cool places” without her.
But this weekend, there were some holidays in Thailand so we had time for 4 days in a row. We decided to visit Ko Mak. Ko Mak is a beautiful tropical island far away from the tourist centers and is (supposed to be) laid-back even during high season. It’s shores are skirted by beaches, coconut palmtrees and inviting wooden bungalows. While exploring the island, we also saw a few gum plantages. On the northern end of the island, following a signposted bicycle trail, we also visited one of the three(?) villages on the island which was titled as “primitive community” by the bicycle trail signs :-D. I wonder why the people in that village are not offended to be called primitive by these signs (and who put them up).
Gum tree
One of the piers
Crab traps (I think)
On this island, it is quite apparent during low season that it is low season, though.
I’d say about three quarters of all the accommodation and restaurants are closed. Speed boats go only twice a day and had to be booked in advance. Regular wooden ferries just go twice a week and take three hours to reach the island.
Also, one can expect that it will rain heavily at least once a day. It’s still 27°C here, so it is a warm rain and it didn’t hinder us to rent bicycles and explore the island. Much to Lena’s demise, I had to stop every few hundred metres and note down the street names for the mapping project and of course, I had a general tendency to cycle down the uncharted muddy tracks instead of the concrete main roads. ;-)
Here is a map of the gps trace and the notes I made during our bicycle tour(s):
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Modern Cartography
For everyone who wonders what I am doing here, apart from travelling and making half-hearted attempts at learning the Thai language: I contribute to the OpenStreetMap project!
What is OpenStreetMap? I will just cite what JOSM gives as a description:
“OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.”
For places I travel to (and live), I track the path I took with my smartphone. These GPS traces can be uploaded to OpenStreetMap and serve as auxiluary data for people who map an area. The only thing one needs for that is a GPS-enabled smartphone or a GPS receiver.
The other way to contribute is to directly edit the map, taking as a source either Bing satellite imagery1, other copyright-free maps or the data gained by an own expedition into that area, using your own GPS traces with points of interests noted down. One can edit the map directly on www.openstreetmap.org through the “Edit” tab in the browser, just like Wikipedia.
Here an example of a super-detailed part of map because this is where I have my flat ;-). I’d love to show you before-after images forgot to take a before-screenshot. So just let me tell you that the area shown in the screenshot just consisted of the canal there before I added the rest to the map.
This is what I’ve been doing. Check out the next blog article to see how such a GPS trace with points of interest noted down on my smartphone looks when I return from a survey.
1 That’s right, evil open-source fiend Microsoft supports OpenStreetMap by allowing OSM contributors to use their satellite imagery to be used as a source without imposing any limitations on the derived data. As opposed to Google by the way, who even just launched their own crowdsourcing application to enhance their maps by community contributions. On that topic, read this!
Salt & Pepper
In restaurants in Germany, there is always salt & pepper on the table. In Spain, it is oil and vinegar and what is on the table in Thailand?
(from right to left:) Chili powder, Tabasco pepper sauce, pepper, another pepper sauce, a chili sauce, another chili sauce aaand Maggi sauce. What doesn’t fit? ;-)
Maggi is really a more common sight on tables than soy sauce, that quite surprised me.
Buddha comic
Found this comic about the life of Buddha in a 7-Eleven mini supermarket. It was standing in the shelf at TOP 3. An insight into the Thai comic style and that it is different from japanese manga.
Also on the same shelf:
One about the life of the king. One has to understand that the royal family here is extremely popular, there are photos and posters of him everywhere: above the family shrine (often next to photos of certain monks), in bars, cafes and shops, in tuk-tuks or in extra large at main roads and roundabouts.
My new home
Everytime when I start a new travel, I get so many new impressions that I don’t know where to start with. So I’ll just skip with any kind of introduction and instead show you some pictures of my new home in Rangsit, a suburb of Bangkok.
View from our favorite restaurant in my neighborhood to the apartment houses
View to the same restaurant from my balcony. It is the rain season. Of course, that doesn’t stop the temperature to climb over 35 degrees celsius almost each day.
Our room. Lena made sure that the furniture we bought fit to the wall color ;-)
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Impresiones aleatorias #3
This is the third and final flush of random impressions from my last week of travel, this time mostly from Chiapas (Mexico).
This shot is from within a dormitory in a backpacker hostel at lake Atitlan (Guatemala). It’s almost like a tree house :-)
A note in the same hostel: So the news that a particular cash machine was tempered with in Antigua, a city which is about 4 hours away from the lake, reached some relatively isolated backpacker hostel but not the authorities right at the bank? Wow. I guess this is Guatemala :-P
This is how a tourist village can also look like :-). Even though it’s very developed touristically, San Pedro la Laguna has a nice laid-back atmosphere.
This is one of these typical mini tiendas (kiosks) at Los Encuentros – a crossroads where many travellers change the busses. In Guatemala, many shops at crowded places are secured like this. Note the advertisements :-)
In this church, they put Jesus in another pose for a change, not just on the crucifix. To create this radiant effect on Jesus, they tied lots of white (cotton) strings from the center to the border. Gives a nice effect, IMO.
Hey there, Cowboy! So you already reached Mexico, huh?
A pimped up VW Käfer in the streets of San Cristobal de las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico). There are loads and loads of VW cars in Mexico, and most of them are VW Käfers and VW vans (T1-T3 – the old ones). I think I saw more VW cars in Mexico than in Germany, actually – VW has a very good reputation here :-). The VW vans are used as public transportation as the so called “collectivos” – more or less taxis with a fixed route and a fixed price which will leave as soon as they are full.
The best advertisement for a barber shop (peluceria), isn’t it? Who wouldn’t like to have a mane like him?? :-D (Who exactly is that, by the way?)
The market area in San Cristobal. I like those shots of chaotic streets with a lot of people doing their business. But this is not how whole San Cristobal looks like, it looks like…
…this. At least what is halfway in the center.
What meat+potatoes is for us Germans, the taco is for Mexico. It’s basically just a wheat tortilla with meat, onions and salsa but it’s really good :-) (at least this one on the picture)
Yeah, it has been through a lot :-)
Impresiones aleatorias #2
This is the second flush of random impressions of Central America. This time, more focussed on Guatemala.
This guy was selling some kind of water ice shake. The best thing about his cart was the ice-crusher machine :-)
Some kids in Nicaragua
Yeah, what an unforgettable adventure it was travelling with this bus company (Fuentes del Norte)…! I read this poster after I spent one night without any sleep in a bus with no leg-space (I mean, even less than normal! ^^) and with no working AC plus windows that can’t be opened. They “solved” this problem by opening the emergency exit windows a little bit and fixing them into position with screws, thus destroying the emergency exits and creating a wind tunnel in which the wind constantly blew through. I was sitting at the window. So while we stopped, it was unbelievably hot and while we were on the road, a strong wind blew into my face all the time o_o
Piñatas at a toy shop in Panajachel :-)
Me in a tuc-tuc (auto rickshaw)
In a reserve near lake Atitlan
In the same reserve :-)
Unfortunately, they are everywhere. It seems, almost in every village there is agun shop.
At the border to Guatemala: Ok, I get, it, don’t touch, it’s dangerous. :-)
A street in Solola (I think)