Summer -- time for tourists, pink flab & heat!

It may sound strange when I say that I am now on the final week of my summer holidays, but TiT -- this is Thailand! Here, they don't judge their seasons by the calendar but by the weather, & as we are now entering the hottest time of year, they call this summer. Strangely logical, don't you think?

We are also nearing the end of the peak tourist season, which matters when you live in a tourist town. Downtown Hua Hin is still filled with pasty looking foreigners, scantily clad to make sure they get sunburnt nice & quickly. A lot of them have obviously not read up on Thailand before coming here & so they think it's neat to walk around the downtown streets as if they were on the beach. Thailand can be a very conservative place & so although they may not say so, they do not like people walking around topless. For women, even going topless on the beach could get one into trouble but for the men, strolling around the shops topless may give you a holiday feeling but it won't please the locals. What's more, like those in shorts, the ones who choose to go topless are usually the ones who definitely shouldn't! Seeing all that pink skin is bad enough but pink beer guts & rolls of raw flab are enough to put me off my breakfast! A friend of mine once observed that women can never be equal with men until they can walk down the street, balding, badly shaven & with a more than ample beer belly hanging over their trousers, & still think they're sexy! Judging by some of the males who 'parade' up & down Hua Hin's avenues, he has a very good point!

Tomorrow, I'm off to Bangkok for a few days. I haven't been in the 'Big Mango' since last October, when I went there on a day trip. This time, we're staying a few days & so I may well suffer a bit of culture shock. After all, Bangkok has many things that Hua Hin doesn't, like lifts, traffic jams, crowds, department stores, taxis, pollution & pubs that aren't girlie bars! We'll be going by 'VIP bus', which means one of the almost-double-deckers with a/c & toilets. Leaving here at around 6.30am, we should hit the Bangkok traffic sometime between 9 & 10. However, with one of the easiest driving tests in the world (which a lot of Thais prefer not to take), a 225km drive can be a little bit like the Twilight Zone, so if I make it back in one piece, I shall tell you about my adventures (?) later on!