Here’s some more on the new digs.
It’s basically two rooms – a dining / bedroom / lounge, and a toilet / shower.
It’s 5500 baht / month, as opposed to 500 baht / day I had been paying for roughly equivalent hotel rooms. I’m on the 7th floor. See pix below.
Like those hotel rooms, it has no cooking facilities. It does have a microwave. No kitchen bench or sink though.
It’s the safe option for now. I was very tempted to go out to Mae Rampheung beach. I would have paid an extra 1000 baht / month. And I would have travelled a bout 30 minutes more to and from work each day. But I decided to concentrate on surviving at work ( which is a struggle ) first, and then think about getting flash.
Traffic
It’s pretty close to work – it takes 5 minutes on a good day to ride. Sometimes closer to 10, it depends on how well I do playing chicken in the traffic.
There are no lights on my route, and I’m not sure anyone follows road rules. On the busiest intersections at rush hours, you’ll see puffy little guys in army green whistling up a cacophony and waving their hands about – these are ‘traffic police’. Everybody else seems more or less to follow their directions, so I do likewise.
Amenities
It’s close enough to a couple of major chain stores and supermarkets. But you can do just as well, or better, food shopping at the roadside stalls. These are open when the owners feel like it, but especially the evenings. Two nights ago, I did a little tour down the ( same ) road, and had a) smoked eel , then b) sliced pork served on plate of green with a beautiful sweet sauce, and c) two or three kebabs ( ‘peeg’, she told me ). That added up to about 100 baht. Less than NZ $5.