Hanging w/ Rob & Edie

Rob & Edie's house - North of Bangkok

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I moved this post into a new thread.  It was a pretty long run on from another one.

Thankfully Rob & his wife Edie (friends of my mom and aunt) said I could come & stay w/ them in Bangkok, so I am staying with them now.  They are so nice and friendly & it feels really good to stay at their place.  Their place is also really nice!  Edie designed the whole thing and hand picked everything, the windows, the wood, all of it.  Rob said in Santa Cruez it costs about $200/sq ft to build a house & their house cost about $40/sq ft & they have really expensive glass, wood, stones, so that shows how cheap labor is.  They live in really good fashion and have a personal driver plus a in-house maid like Kaifu's home.  It is really cool they have dinner cooked for them every night & I get a breakfast made for me, it is really a nice life they have.  I am really amazing at the engineering of their house too, there is so much hi-tech stuff about the house, such as the insulating so their A/C bill is really cheap or the triple pane windows that would stop smaller size bullets. 

Edie on the left, Yut - the cook, on the right. Apparently I didn't take any of Rob

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They also have a friend staying up there right now, a Scottish guy named Tom whose wife is in the hospital with cancer.  He seems to be taking it really well as it sounds like she only has a couple days left.  Tom is very nice and hasn't been shown sadness about any of it.  He jokes and laughs a lot which is good to see. 

Edie took me up to Ayuttha yesterday which is the old capital of Thailand where Burma attacked and pushed the Thais back to Pattaya back in the day.  There is dozens and dozens of Wats (temples) up there, sometimes every 25m theres a new one.  Edie took me to two of the famous ones, some old one w/ long Thai name & lots of old brick buildings & then to the Big Buddha which is something like 4 stories tall!  There is some pretty amazing architecture out here. 

My room @ their house. Yut would fold my blanket and do my laundry every day.

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I also road an elephant & fed the baby elephants which was pretty fun.  Riding an elephant is interesting, they have this chair that sits on top of the elephant but as the elephant walks it sways back and forth so it seems like you'll fall but you really won't. 

Then we went to the Queens crafts center, which is a project set up by the Queen for really poor people to make crafts & sell them and the money is put back into helping more poor people get out of poverty.  It was pretty cool, except most of the stuff was closed, but I did get to see how Thais use to live in the old days, and still do in rural areas.  Each region of Thailand has a different style of house & Edie showed me one that looked just like hers when she was growing up. 

After that we picked Rob up @ Seiko which was pretty cool.  I see all these workers in the same uniform & its just like in my globalization class I took.  Pretty amazing to see first hand what I learned.  Western Digital, Toyota, Seagate, Fujitsu, they are all here.  While we waited for Rob we saw the shift change, @ Seiko there are about 2500 employees which is considered small for the area they are in.  Fujitsu has something like 18000 employees!  Anyways, during the shift change all the Thai girls that work in the factory kept staring at me, probably cause they don't see many young white guys.  It was funny though.  Also while we were at a temple a bunch of school girls wanted to get their picture taken with me & then they had a interview form for me to fill out, that was pretty funny.  I also found out that the clean rooms in Rob's factory are cleaner than the hospitals in Bangkok.... No comment there.

Tom, the Scottish guy. His wife just died of cancer in the hospital. The doctors said she wouldn't last 6 months & she ended up living 4 & half years.

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This might sound lame, but we had tacos for dinner & the  night before we had chicken, mashed potatoes & stuffing, but when everything I've been eating is rice,noddles, pork, chicken, all Thai style it sure is good to eat some Mexican food or Thanksgiving style food!

Rob & Edie also have 2 nice fat dogs who are 4 & 8 yrs old.  Which in Thailand is really long considering the avg. age of dogs is 1 to 2 years!  They are really smart and know so many commands/tricks.  Edie can go "kiss" & they will come up and lick her face, it is so cool!  They also are bilingual and know commands in Thai & English!  One is a dalmation & 1 is a black lab.  Very fun dogs. 

Oh & I went in a 7-11 today & found energy drinks for 10 baht (.25 cents) which is a lot better than $2 for rockstar!!!!