The Olivers In Thailand

We arrived eventually in Chiang Mai last Friday to our new house.

Despite having a total of 145kg of luggage, with an allowance of 100kg with Emirates, we successfully checked it all through - apparently Emirates unofficially allow 28kg/person for cattle class.

All our luggage safely arrived in Bangkok, where we had to transfer to a domestic flight with Air Asia. They allow 15kg/person - a total of 75kg. On all our previous flights, there has never been an issue. This time they wanted to charge for the excess. They allowed us to take one extra back-pack as hand luggage, but charged us excess for 50kg at 80Baht/kg - including for the bag of second hand clothes for the orphanage.

What we did not realise was that the back-pack contained a new bottle of expensive hair conditioner...which the x-ray found - they knew it was at the very very bottom of the bag! Talk about loosing your hair over something...

Having boarded the flight in good time, a total of £70 lighter, they pushed the plane back, fired up the engines, played solitaire for 5 minutes, cut the engines and pulled us back in - plane fault. All off. Wait 1 1/2 hours before boarding a spare aircraft. So instead of arriving at 22:00 local time, it was 23:30.

Andrew May collected us from Chiang Mai airport, with all our luggage accounted for (except the hair conditioner...)

Anyway, our new house is lovely.

Front of house and field (Mays house will be to the left of the photo)

Garden

We even have a fish pond. The children's first task on Saturday was to empty the murky water and refill, making sure the 7 fish from the deep survive. Any advice on looking after "fish"? Can they been eaten?

Kitchen out the back

Dinning room

Food!

This week has gone fast. The children were back to school on Tuesday, parent's evenings on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, Tom was out at a school retreat Friday evening, David and Jessica had friends over for bowling and sleep-overs.

On Friday we met with our friends from the Golden Triangle region - they were down with their nephew doing the elephant camp rides, and collected computers from Chiang Mai to equip their computer classrooms back home. It was also good to discuss with them how things are going and plans for the coming year.

The Mays are currently busy packing as they cannot stand their new neighbours (us!) and will be moving a bit further away across the field.

The Hyttedalens are arriving back next Saturday - Thomas, you can see your car in the top photo in front of our while Toyota...

We got the computers setup fairly quickly in the new office - must get an isolating transformer - I had forgotten about how you keep getting electrical shocks from all the computers and anything connected to them, even though all the equipment is connected through their power supplies. The problem is there is no earthing. I measured the mains - "Live" is about 235Vac, "Neutral" is 2Vac - was using the fish pond as "earth" - best I could find...sorry fish!

Between outings to buy fan (currently 32'C), water cooler (fridge is small - not enough room to cool the water), printer (grand total of £18 for full colour printer), we have managed to do a good amount of work for Eurotherm, PocketWeather, Sussex Neighbourhood Watch.

We have also received an update from the Wa Bible translation team - more on that later.

Yes, we have only been back a week.

Oh yes - we have already had a powercut. Thought it might be a long one, as the transformer down the road made a rather large bang as the lights and "Yes Prime Minister" went out. No UPS yet...