Well I have been up to a lot recently. So much that I barely have had time to write any updates!

I have been up North to Yasothon in the North East of Thailand. It took about 10 hours by car but all in all it wasnt a bad trip.

I stayed in Nangs family house which is in a little village called Baan Chai Cha-na (means the winning village!). Its a quaint little village in the middle of nowhere.

The locals are friendly and dont see many farangs. No-one speaks English and when they figure out I can speak Thai I am inundated with questions. Once I made the mistake to tell one person that I can read palms. I read her palm as a little joke but she took it seriously and I ended up with queues of people waiting for me to read theirs!

We looked at building a house on land owned by Nangs family and talked to a few builders. Finally, with some negotiations and a lot of recommendations from previous customers we agreed a deal with one builder. It is a lovely house with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. It is about 250sqm and has a really nice style – certainly one of the best designs I have seen up there! It will be finished in 6 months – tops! Fingers crossed that it will all work out well.

Toilets are an issue up there as most people squat and plop. I cant do that and have a hard time balancing. Normally I survive quite well up there but this time the water was cut-off for a few days so things were getting quite stinky! Not so long ago they only used the water from the well but nowadays technology has started to reach them and they have running water – and they start to become reliant on it! A bit like office people when their computers crash – they cant seem to work without them – except they forget that they managed it for years without any problems before the arrival of the PC.

The drive home was a disaster and the road from Bangkok to Hua Hin is just getting worse all the time. They are trying to upgrade it but it has resulted in kilometres of road works. Nothing seems to be getting finished – just more roads being dug up. Hopefully someone will think about putting down some tarmac soon!!! I nearly crashed about 10 times -its a real nightmare.

My grandmother isnt well and I have decided (last minute) to go back to Ireland for Xmas. I will be flying on Thursday 21st – arriving in Ireland late that night. I will be back in Thailand on January 6th.

Hopefully over the holidays I will have time to write some updates and upload them. While I was in Yasothon I wrote a lot of articles but just havent had time to upload them. It wont be long now!