Isan (Apologies for the slight duplication)

Hi folks. I’m sorry for the long absentia, no idea why it’s been so long really. I just haven’t really felt like writing. I guess I’m just getting used to lots of alone time.

I don’t even remember what I wrote last... Lets guess that I was in Nong Kai, which I left for Khon Kaen in the heart of the Isan region. On that bus trip I had my first experience with slightly dodgy Thais. First up one of the ticket inspectors bustled me onto the bus roughly and sat me down and then asked for a bunch more money than the bus ride was worth. Which is a fairly common one, and luckily I’d bought my ticket the day before. Then one of the bus guys jumped under the bus and into the luggage compartment during one of the quick stops we made to drop people off. This isn’t such an uncommon occurrence either and doesn’t necessarily mean he’s doing anything dodge. But I just had bad feeling about this crew of bus operators, and there are enough stories of things going missing in this manner. I’d sat myself over the luggage door to keep an eye out for this anyway, and luckily I was getting off at the next stop. And sure enough when one of the guys opened the luggage compartment door at the next stop he did a quick peer over to make sure everything was in order. I checked my bag right there before I took it off, and it hadn’t been tampered with so that was lucky. Maybe I was just being paranoid. The majority of my bus rides are great and the bus crew never do anything wrong, but it doesn’t hurt to be aware of these things.

Then I stayed at a place called First Choice in Khon Kaen, run by an old white guy and an old Thai woman who were married and seemed to hate each other. It seems like they were once a good couple though, much of an age and both relatively normal people, unlike a lot of the expats over here. But I had a good time there, and watched a lot of news because it was always on. The BP oil spill had just happened, and Israel had just dropped commandos from a helicopter onto a boat load of peace activists, resulting in 10 deaths. I did lots of programming there, and it turned out that the old geezer who ran the place was actually a pretty techy guy. I forget now what he’d worked on, but he was extremely high up in some American tech firm, and currently trying to disentangle himself from it and retire. We had some pretty fascinating conversations about esoteric programming languages, Steve Jobs, and electronic products, during which I realised that he was also fantastically rich and unhappy.

Actually, I realised something very important while at that guest house. My room was up on the third floor and consisted of 2 coconut fibre filled mattresses, a desk, and a chair. The first night I slept on those incredibly hard mattresses I awoke with a sore lower back. This worried me as generally lower back pain is a bad thing. The next night I slept with a pillow under my knees to try and rotate my hips a little while I slept. Luckily I’d long since taught myself to sleep on my back or I would have been in trouble. By the fourth night I’d lost the second pillow again as my back was feeling great. It felt like it was getting stronger, and I noticed that it felt better than normal during the day as well. I was a little blown away by all of this to be honest. Beds are one of those things which you don’t really get to test enough. You just have one, and you don’t know how good it is because you really need to sleep on another one by yourself for a week to see how it measures up. And most people have pretty similar beds so even when I’ve slept over at other people’s houses it’s usually on another soft Western mattress. Westerners in Thailand all agree that the beds here are universally very hard, but these coconut filled beds were yet another order of magnitude of hardness again on normal Thai beds. And yet they were freaking AWESOME once I got used to them. Which makes sense when I think about it, because we didn’t evolve with beds, they’re really a very recent invention on the scale of human evolution. We were designed to sleep on the ground, or maybe on furs. But not on 30cm of squishy foam, no matter how many scientists have endorsed it. SO I think I’m going to have to ditch my mattress when I get home and try a sleeping on a futon or something. When I got back to Chaing Mai from Khon Kaen and took a room I found the bed far too soft on the first night, though it was one of the firm 5cm Thai mattresses. My back hurt again the next day :-(. So for the next couple of nights I slept on the tile floor on a folded up wool blanket. But then I kept waking up around 4 every morning with sore hip bones and had to climb into bed anyway. So it seem I need a really firm bed which doesn’t mould itself to my back or let my hips rotate, but which is still soft enough that it does’t bruise my hip bones.