Saturday, March 8, 2008

We aten't dead!

Sorry, still getting into the swing of blogging....

Anyway, the past posts haven't given much of a realistic impression of what we've been actually up to the past couple of weeks! We certainly have not been sitting around the apartment the whole time (speaking of which, I need to post some apartment pics soon). We've been spending quite a bit of time exploring our neighborhood (Sukhumvit Sois 3-11), and going a little further afield. Last Saturday, for example, we took a trip down to the river to see the National Museum.

This weekend, we are sticking a bit closer to home, because Josh is getting over a sinus infection. We've been taking advantage of a service called Food by Phone (http://foodbyphone.com/), which delivers from a whole bunch of local restaurants. Last night we had Thai food from a well-known place called Cabbages and Condoms (it was started by the PDA, Thailand's equivalent of Planned Parenthood, and all profits from the restaurant go back to the organization. The food is "guaranteed not to make you pregnant"!) Tonight we ordered from an excellent Lebanese restaurant down the street. Over the past week we've actually gone out a whole bunch, from German to Indian to Tex-Mex places, and we've enjoyed trying some foods from the street vendors as well, from chaa nom yen (known in the US as "Thai iced tea") to fresh sliced guava.

Thailand's food culture is really unique-- the street food is some of the best eating in the country! I knew that when we came, but I didn't expect the huge range of really good restaurants of other types as well. The German Bierhaus just around the corner rivals Das Waldcafe (for those of you from Newport News). Best of all is the price-- a meal on the street will cost 25-30 baht (about $1), and an "expensive" meal out will cost a bit under 1000 baht (around $30) for both of us together.

We'll try to get some pictures of the neighborhood up soon-- we just keep forgetting the camera when we go out!

Monday, March 3, 2008

Back at work...

So, today (Monday) was my first official day back at work (I'm working half-time from home). I'm really glad to be back on a regular schedule, actually, and relieved that everything is working out with our high-speed Internet connection so far! I'm still pinching myself that it's even possible for me to continue my job from halfway around the globe!

We signed up for our Internet service through our apartment building, which is standard practice here in Thailand: each building will have an agreement with a particular cable, Internet, etc. provider, and you can simply arrange things at the front desk. Our building fortunately works with one of the better service providers, TRUE Corp.; I've heard that other companies can leave much to be desired in terms of their service and the speed of their connection. Getting started was simple: we picked up our modem once it arrived at the front desk, followed the easy English instructions, and we were set to go! Our connection is ADSL (through the phone line), and is limited to about 1 MBPS, mostly because there is a connection bottleneck for international traffic going into/out of the Kingdom.

Last week I was apprehensive about the Internet thing panning out, because we were having issues with our Linksys wireless router (brought from home). Turns out that we think the router was damaged in transit, because it kept dropping the connection. After calling the Internet provider's help line (which provides excellent English support!) I ended up going down to Power Buy, the Thai equivalent of Best Buy, and purchasing a wireless router specifically for ADSL. It's worked like a charm, and I am able to make the VPN connections I need to be able to telecommute. Uploading/downloading is still slow, but we can deal with that. We've even been able to get our Nintendo Wii online again, and have downloaded some Virtual Console games to add to our library of one Wii game...so we've been reliving the past and playing Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Brothers over the past few days!