First Asian Adventures -- Thailand

An interesting redundancy-induced first trip to the Land Of Smiles.. as the internet bubble was bursting, I -- probably like hundreds and thousands of other young professionals around the Globe -- was making a nice living in London selling internet projects for a now no longer existing outfit.. and when the sales teams were dissolved in the third redudancy round, I was part of it, at that point already "working from home" for many weeks waiting for this to happen as of course no-one had been buying anything for months already..

Luckily, I was on a fully paid three months notice (yep, there are such things in Europe, my dear Yank friends *g), so when the day came and I was looking at three months of paid vacations, I made my way to the nearest discount travel agent and booked myself a flight to Bangkok..

Taking in the breathtaking sights of the big city, and despite the stink (funny, I didn't smell it any more in recent visits) and the chaos and pollution, I fell in love with this city. It's just such a blast, like Vegas as the adult's playground in the US, and Amsterdam in Europe, Bangkok is the same for the East. It has fabulous hotels, of course everything at a knockdown prices compared to the developed Western world (where else can you book a five star hotel in the middle of the city for 60 Euros??), superb restaurants of all sorts from delicious street fare (probably the most memorable noodle soup I had for literally pennies at a street vendor in Vietnam, but more on that trip later) to some of the best Sushi restaurants in the world (try the one in the Landmark building, and stay away from buffet sushi), to excellent shopping, night life, etc..

And of course, should you have had enough of it all at one point, just get on a bus or plane and within a short time you're in the rain forest, on tropical islands, visiting the miracle of Angkor Wat, and so on..

I have grouped the Thai adventures over a few years here, as the precise chronology of the trips is a) neither here nor there fore the reader and b) unless I reconstruct it meticulously with tickets and other "evidence", the memories are grouped in my brain according to destination and how memorable the experience was, not necessarily according to year and month.. so as we come closer to the presence (at this time of writing August 2006), the accounts will get more and more precise in terms of chronology, but for the journeys that date back several years, I will group them as seems sensible to get the point across.