Cooking courses and grenades

I'm lying in my room trying to get deal with an extreme case of overeating coupled with mass consumption of chili. Today I did a Thai cooking course which was really cool. But me and Dan, an American friend, were inclined to egg each other on with the chili, both being massive chili lovers. We never made anything too hot for us to eat, but eating so many meals in about 5 hours, coupled with the fact that most of them were moving towards the upper limit of my chili tolerance means I'm feeling slightly worse for wear right now. But I'm improving fairly rapidly again. Should be all good by the time we head to the jazz club :-).

So I went out to the reggae club again and danced the night away AGAIN with those same people. But this time I only had 2 little beers over the entire course of the night, and they were mostly just to keep my energy levels up so I didn't fall asleep. I've fallen in with a really cool posse (There are some photo's on Facebook of these nights out for those of you care to look). They all love a good time, but also aren't really into getting destroyed. Some of them don't drink at all, some do a little, and some do a lot, but it makes it easy to just do your own thing. We have a lot of banter and laughter which is really really great fun. The other night when we went out again, we went with some foreign guys who are living locally and studying. The night started off well, but then got strange. We ended up accidentally splitting up a bit, I ended up with the 2 girls Ara and Aurelie (Scandy and frog), and these 2 guys who were living there. Long story short these guys got really really drunk, were driving really fast, snorting coke, arguing with their girlfriends very loudly whilst each trying to crack onto Ara and Aurelie. Very strange, so the 3 of us just ditched and walked home. It was quite odd. But still a fun night. Except that I really can't be bothered with normal clubs, the music is so bad!! This reggae club and the Jazz club are both great, and I love Psi when I can find it (which is never over here), but the music going in normal clubs makes me want to saw my ears off. It was such a stark change going from the reggae club with a live band to these other clubs playing the same set of songs as each other with the same monotonous beat. God it drives me insane!!!

So.... Some bombs went off in Chaing Mai on Sunday. One was less than 1km from where I was at the time. It was a little hand made one, the other was a hand grenade into the parking lot of a courthouse. Bangkok has really been heating up too, there have been hand grenade and rocket propelled grenade attacks, and home made bombs going off. For the most part they've gone off in places where nobody is around, but I believe recently that one did kill at least 1 person. It's a little surreal. Chiang Mai is almost a ghost town at the moment, even a week before those bombs went off, foreigners are leaving in droves, and even locals are leaving, although mostly to go and join the protesting I believe. But life goes on.

And with that little 'bombshell' (hahaha, get it? Not funny really) I'll be off.

Love to everybody,

Frankie J.

P.S. No pictures this time, although I've got some, adding them in here is not super easy so I'll do them another time.