Rubbishness

Indeed I have been a touch rubbish with the old blogger updates. That's purely because I haven't been up to much. I left Vientiane (no job for me... boo!) and caught the train down to Bangkok. Good train journbey all in all. Got talking with one of the guys serving food and drink and ended up playing about six million games of rummy with him. I arrived in Bangkook at about 8 in the morning and was strangely pleased to be back. I took a tuk tuk to Khao San and was shortly displeased to be back. Bangkok is opne of those cities that makes you feel extremely trapped. Hardly anywhere is there any open space and noise from the traffic and pollution just adds to the claustrophobia. So I spent three days there I think (managed to find a guesthouse with a pool on the roof and that offered a kind of getaway) and then decided to come to Pattaya as Phil'll be arriving here on the 22nd. My hopes of being able to lie on the beach and do nothing were pretty much shattered as there's some kind of Thai festival going on here this weekend. The beach road is lined with stalls selling everything imaginable (and some things that were beyond imagination), offering tours, stage shows, the usual things that you'd associate with festival type activity. I think it might have something to do with the queen but I can't be sure and I don't care that much to be honest. They're also having the X-games at the moment so for the last two days I've been watching skating and BMX, inbetween walking up and down looking at the various stalls. Although my beach lazing was shattered, it's been cool just wandering about checking out all the different stuff that's been going on. The time has come for beachness though, so today I'm going to have a look at Jawmthien beach just south of Pattaya. It's meant to be a bit quieter and cleaner and if it's good I'll move in there tomorrow. After that I'll be moving into the Royal Cliff Beach Hotel (or something along those lines) for Phil's arrival on the 22nd. Can't wait to see him again. As for the hotel, I'm sure you can imagine it's a touch flashpackerish, but it's out of the way so it makes sense for me to stay there whilst Phil's there, otherwise we'd have a nightmare trying to meet up. Haha, it's also got a bloody nice pool. Just found this; you can take a virtual tour of the room I'll be staying in if you click http://www.royalcliff.com/ipix/java.asp?javaName=RCLFbch_Mini_Suite_Jav.ipx on that. Take a look at the pools too. Mmm. Lovely.