ThaiBankie

This is Nurse Ruth

Here is a great video from a couple of years ago.  It is amazing just how much Megan has changed and grown up over the last couple of years.

Noddy from ThaiBankie on Vimeo.

Nok took Megan to the shopping mall yesterday and stopped of at one of the small photo studios to get some photos of her.  Here are the results.

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Last week we had to go to Lopburi to attend the wedding of a very old friend from my very first days of Thailand more than 7 years ago.  Jarunee who worked in the Quality dept had always really helped me in the early days much as she had done with my predecessor, Ian, in the time before I worked there.  She was always arranging hotels, transport, parties and anything else that we needed help with.  She even helped me and Nok arrange some parts of my wedding as well as being the host on stage at the wedding reception.  It was a given that I would not be able to miss her wedding after how good a friend she has been to me over the years.

I had been out for a few beers on the Saturday night so I was a bit tender on the Sunday when it was time to leave and drive to Lopburi. I started the car and put my foot on the clutch and I thought that it didn’t feel like it normally does but maybe it was the hangover and I was imagining things.  We managed to drive the 60Km along the east ring road around Bangkok and were taking the slip road and having driven the majority of the last 60Km in 5th gear it was time to drop the gear and slow down a little but the clutch dropped to the floor with almost no effort and I spent the next 10 seconds trying to find a gear that I could get into.  Nok said to just go home but I didn’t want to miss the wedding so I decided to keep going and fight with the gearbox for the next 90Km until we got to Lopburi.  The wedding was good and it was really great meeting up with people that I had not seen for the past 4 years.

The drive home after the wedding was a nightmare greater than anything I had experienced before.  Every time I needed to slow down or stop because of the traffic I would desperately try to find a gear that I could get into so that I could drive when I needed to.  A few times I was in a real panic as I didn’t think I would be able to do it, then I remembered a time about 17years ago when I worked on the Ice-Cream van and it’s clutch cable had broken.  I remember someone telling the driver of the van to keep the revs high and it will go into gear easier, and I was even more surprised when I tried it a couple of times and it worked.  We managed to get home safe and on the Monday morning I drove the car to the Honda garage to get it repaired.  We also decided to get it serviced at the same time so I was surprised when the bill was only 5200Baht (80quid).

While my car was being repaired we managed to borrow Tuk and Paibool’s Ford Escape which was a big big help to us because we didn’t want Megan to miss school as it was her last week.  This weekend we needed to return the car to Rayong and we set out in a convoy with Nok leading in the Escape and me trundling along behind in my Jazz.  After about 60Km I noticed that the car was starting to get a bit hotter and thought that it must be getting really hot outside but when I turned up the fan it didn’t make any difference, in fact it was probably getting hotter.  I called Nok and told her that the air conditioning in the car was not working so we continued south to get to Rayong.  I had all the windows down and was starting to get really sweaty but it wasn’t too long till we reached Tuk’s house.

Megan was not to happy about driving with the windows open and she would always tell me to put the windows up a little every now and then.  By the time we got home they were only open about 1cm and almost nothing was coming in through them but it was early evening so the temperature outside was starting to drop a little.

Honda just finished fixing it this time and it is costing me 8090Baht (125quid) to fix it but in Thailand it is a small price to pay to keep cool while driving.

Megan finished her first year of kindergarten today, actually she only joined midway through the year so she has had an easy start.  She will now have a 6 week break from school and return in May.  We are thinking about putting her in for 3 weeks during summer school so that she is well prepared for the year ahead but nothing is confirmed yet. 

As the school is only a kindergarten the kids will need to go to another school once they finish K3.  Today was the schools first graduates as it is only a new school and it was the first time for them to put on a show with all the kids from all the classes from Pre-Kindergarten 1, 2 and 3 and also Kindergarten 1, 2 and 3. 

She is already exited about going into K2 after the summer and today we found out that her new teacher, Teacher Tammy, is the mother of her old teacher, Teacher Cat.

Below is a video of Megan performing with her classmates on stage.

Show at Kindergarten from ThaiBankie on Vimeo.