Pez and Noony go away

So, we’ve left behind the bustling main highway of Hua Lamphong with its twelve lane intoxicating spread of fuming, pink taxis, tuk-tuks, and other transportation. We couldn’t say we’ve ‘done’ Bangkok unless we spent a night or two on the Koh San Road. After spending a (sleepless) night there I can honestly say, no word of a lie, literally, at the end of the day, when all’s said and done, (…do you know what I mean?) that it is quote/unquote “mental”.

We haven’t taken a photo of the road, but I don’t think i would want to for fear of pickpocket people splashing talcum powder in my face and running off with my stolen photographic memories.

“Hello sir and pretty lady, you luk lak business man, you want tailor?”

Our good friend, Will, who is meeting us next weekend for Cambodian treats, has suggested a firm “NO SIR” which, to our relief, has stopped them – for the most part – from following us. Most of them shake my hand and lead it to their stall of cigarette tins and knuckle dusters. I might buy a knockoff pair of aviators as I know for a fact that face-wear makes me look both super cool and unapproachably serious.

The stalls cover both pavements from tip to toe and, in the night time the roads fill with three types of vendor. The first being the mongolian looking frail, old ladies who wear tall, pointy, beaded mountain hats and try and sell you said hats even though the only other people wearing them are the other mountain ladies. The second are the pushy men who force objects into your hands and expect money in return for the service not asked from you. The most stubborn are the aforementioned tailors, (five times more expensive than vietnam where I WILL get a fancy suit fashioned to my size, naturally). The final kind are those who sit by their stall for 16 hours and don’t move from their seat, they just stare… into space…. waiting….. for someone to come and buy their channel perfume, deezal jeans and rae bann sunnies.

We were warned online that the Charondee hostel is a difficult one from all the noise. Another person wrote for all the players to man up and get some ear plugs. We liked the cut of that reviewer’s jib so decided to try it. We were greeted warmly by a lady and her obedient, blonde labrador and showed to our room. This room was air conditioned, that’s all you need to know. The bathroom has a toilet with a shower nozzle above it. I assume they’re thinking two birds, one stone? The water pipe to the toilet leaks and the mosquitos come at night. Well, only about three, but they were relentless and intimidating.

We have been early birds again and going to bed quite early, so at 11pm we set off to sleep thinking how much quieter it was than the reviews stated. We both woke at 2am to hideous thumping bass. It stopped at 5am. We missed our free breakfast because of this selfish act on the DJ’s part.

Noony is going to write about our day today later on about visiting the Grand Palace.

For now,
Tinkerty Tonk
X

p.s. The dog was lying on the marble floor belly down and legs akimbo. Noony says that labradors have notoriously bad hips and thats how they lie down sometimes. This reminded me of a dream Abbas told me he had about me. We were at Alex’s house and Abbas found me, completely naked face down on Alex’s kitchen floor. When asked why I was there I replied I liked the contrast between the underfloor heating and the cool breeze on my back.

I’m sure we can all interpret Abbas’ moral message and apply it to whatever life holds.

Location:Sunset St,Talat Yot,Thailand

http://www.youtube.com/v/Efq0BWE339U

Location:Ocean world, Bangkok

Today was a very westernised day. After catching the sky train, through what i thought were clouds, we entered Central World, Bangkok’s biggest shopping centre. One man opened the main door for me, another checked my bag for empty calypso tubes, one more pointed at the escalators in front of the main door and all were getting paid a salary to stand and do pretty much nothing.

We decided that window shopping, however awesome, was tiring. So we went to Sea World, or whatever it was called. We had the chance to see baby hammerhead sharks, but Noony said she couldn’t eat a whole one. We had shark fin soup for lunch. It was scrummy. The mink fur serviette was a bit overkill. We got in the glass bottomed boat. We saw sharks, lots of them. Too many to catch. Many couldn’t steer. Not sure why.

I had a massage after that. “but how?” I hear you cry. Don’t cry. My feet were kissed by a hundred fish. I have never been so delicately touched, (until Jean turns up, hopefully). Noony couldn’t bear it (she has a thing about me talking about Jean) so she left.

We decided that fish watching, however awesome, was tiring. So we went window shopping at the really posh second mall. In one shop window were two lamborghinis, the next, a gucci merkin, quite exquisite. We grew tired quickly of how things were in fact more expensive than in England. Boo shucks to the idea of cheap Apple paraphernalia.

The iPad isn’t liking photo uploads at the moment, and is liking even less that the comments about them are fictitious. Also, the follow map feature is pretty useless if it’s just going to keep a map of Chichester in the window.

Pezandnoony 2.0 will address these issues, but for now… Go away.

Location:ถนนพระราม 4,Rong Mueang,Thailand

Well, we made it. 24 hours later.

Our plane was amazing. Never seen anything like it. A screen. In front of your seat! This must be some new fancy technology. We had a nine hour flight to Mumbai which consisted of watching their inflight movies The Godfather and Shrek. They fed us three times and drinks were free. Their apple teenie was a little light on the teenie. Having only travelled by Easyjet, we never knew such luxury. The free pillow, I assume it was free, I took it, was the icing on an Indian cake.

Noony didn’t fair so well. The person behind used the touch screen on her seat as a punching bag, he also sang loudly over his iPod, pinched girls’ bums as they walked past and was walking about when the plane was landing. To stop our middle class anger spilling over into loud tutting, we had to assume he was a special, but he wasn’t. He was a plonker*.

Mumbai airport, however, was awful. Army villains everywhere. They made me wait for 20 minutes whilst my bag was being prepped for searching. Turns out I wasn’t allowed life saving water I bought at heathrow. The lighter and hunting knife were fine.

When we arrived at Bangkok there was a very patient taxi driver, (we were an hour late) who took us in his suped up pink toyota with a 200 litre nitrous tank in the boot. Vroom!

Bangkok is everything we thought it would be. Hectic, smelly, smog ridden but friendly. Going to sleep now but tomorrow we are going shopping in Siam Square, Noony doesn’t know it but I want a Thai bride. Just for cleaning and looking good on my other arm. I shall call her Hong Mei, which local people tell me roughly translates as Jean.

Too tired to ‘hilariously’ comment on events properly, but just can’t believe we are here for over five months. Probably won’t write this much for a post again, because to be honest if you’ve got this far, you are one of few. Silly pictures and overt lies are the way forward for now.

X

*think worse

Location:ถนนพระราม 4,Rong Mueang,Thailand

The graph says it all.

What Noony is packing:

What I am packing:

You can now follow our EXACT movements thanks to some fancy googlemap API and foursquare XML code. Lol.

Click on follow us at the top, we’ve planned our trip so that when zoomed out, all of the pins spell out “boob”, (“boobs” if we make it to the philippines).

I am watching lazily as Noony packs the clothes we both need and, by process of elimination, don’t need into two separate suitcases. It will be comedy gold when I switch her suitcase for her to open it up in Thailand and find nothing but a fluorescent lifeguard jacket and driving goggles.

We are now nervous. Noony says she isn’t but I bet she is. Moths, bugs, mountain people and foreign food served by natives. I am worried that I am going to starve to death. Luckily I found that if I drink before eating I am less stressed. Shame that the drink that does this is Bovril.

On a more upbeat note, we have found that it’s only a couple of quid to Sri Lanka so I’ll go visit my old school’s partner school, which means I can justify to recruiting head teachers that my six month doss had a purely education slant.

Noony wants to sit on an elephant and I want to high five an orangutan. Hopefully both at the same time. These aren’t the only reasons we’re going, but it has made up a substantial part of it, y’know, redundancy and job loss aside.

Noony says I have to put the suitcase we don’t need into the attic now.

She’ll laugh about it one day….

Well, four days in the hills of Bavaria! Our wedding weekend almost started in disaster after we only got our passports back from the Indian visa consort 6 hours before we flew. A stressful couple of days which, to be honest, i wont bore you with.

You wont really care about the details of the weekend, only that it was the marriage between the prize winning scholar at All Souls, Oxford, fundamentalist atheist and a newly appointed oxford classics lecturer, a German devout catholic. It will be the most interesting wedding ever attended, especially as they were wed by an italian monk.

Where are we?

Location:Krugzell, Bavaria

We’ve left Bristol now. Back in 3-5 years. Cheerio!

Location:Laburnum Grove,Chichester,United Kingdom

I’ve been practising my walking this summer. Noony has been staying 40 paces behind me, I think that’s the norm in Asia so I will keep that custom. Other than that, I’ve been doing a lot of vaccinations at the Travel Clinic. I watched the nurse sink the needle into Noony’s arm and I wish I didn’t.

I have been thinking about what to write for a long time now. I have realised the error of my ways as there are still seven weeks (to the day as Noony squeaked at me this afternoon) to go until we are driving to Heathrow to get on a private jet. We have booked our Indian Hostel, the Nirvana Hostel, Delhi. However, an Indian visa asks we put two referees from India on our visa. I’ll give a pound* to anyone who can spot the error of the Indian tourist visa.

Our travel stuff came! A bag and a towel and a mosquito net and a rape alarm; not sure what Noony bought. I was going to take a photo of it, but once it is all in the bag, I’m not sure you’d be able to see the items. Might try though just in case.

Noony is official jobless now. We have been living the free life now. Last night we played UNO until 9pm and today we got up at 10am! I felt so guilty I flagellated until 11.10am. We are very close to selling all of our possessions. We just have the TV left which isn’t bad. Oh, and the car.

I will write another song soon and get Noony to sing it all. She’ll bloody love that. Any subject matter, Asia based, let me know.

*I wont

I wrote a ditty about it today.

It’s called: We’re going to Asia.

Lyrics: We’re going to Asia. x3

We’re going to Asia

It now has a tambourine in it. Thank God for that.

Since I have nothing to say about the trip, I have decided that a post a day is just ridiculous.

Today, Noony said visas are confusing. Dan came round and played –

“Would you rather: continually slam a meerkats hand in a door or stick a pigeon in your bum for 15 minutes?”
“Would you rather: hover when you fart or whistle when you pee?”

Answers on a postcard.

Well, it’s the first day of my summer holidays. Thinking about it, it’s the first day of me being jobless, but thanks to Bristol city council I’m getting 2 more pay cheques to fund this mini-break. Thanks Bristol. Thistol.

I’m looking through old files and feeling all nostalgic. So far I have opened The Church, our Birmingham magazine from 5 years ago that many of us thought would change the world. It did. It made us realise that we would never be as cool as we thought we were then, however hard we tried. The club nights, posters, articles and general collective would naturally disband as we grew older, but we didn’t know that at the time.

Being a primary school teacher is pretty cool, eh, hey? ….Hello?

Anyway, aside from that, it is the holidays and that means I have time to write/recycle music. I’m two-thirds way through a toast trilogy. I’m delving murkily into Badly Drawn Boy territory whereby it’s been 12 years of song writing and I’m still nowhere near anything that resembles a ‘proper song’. And no, granary transudation, does not count.

I’ll have to visit some people I think. Considering that they all live in London, I should book you into my diary. I’m very busy and important at the moment. I haven’t actually told anyone about this blog yet. Considering we’re not leaving the country ’til October 4th, I didn’t think it would mean much.

You all obviously know I’ll just stick stupid images on like how I’ve already packed my suitcase and so on….

Oh dear.