FOUND A NEW HOUSE (AND HAD ANOTHER ACCIDENT...)

I'll write more (and post photos) this weekend but I wanted to let everyone know that we've (finally) found our new house — a three-storey shophouse in Na Kok (นากก) village (moo 5) of Tambon Chalong.  It's in a very nice area with nothing but trees in the view across the street (I can visualize sitting on the balcony outside of the third-floor master bedroom sipping my favorite Tiger Beer while writing on the laptop.  Plenty of space on the ground floor for my wife's restaurant...

The price was right, too — 8000 baht per month; we paid a 10,000-baht deposit today and were given the keys and a hand-written receipt.  On April 1st, we pay the regular rent and receive the 10,000 baht back so it's like getting three weeks rent for free.  The building itself is just three months old but has accumulated a lot of dust in the time it's sat empty so I'm anxious to get in there and do some cleaning before we start moving stuff.  This afternoon, I also paid our last month's rent at Ananda Garden Hills and asked our landlord if we could buy the furniture from him but he said we had to leave our current house furnished as the day we moved in.

I'll post a selection of photos in the next day or so...

I'm very happy we found this house when we did as I was about to give up.  We'd spent A LOT of time looking and coming up rather empty.  We'd even begun to consider renting some rooms in a guesthouse on Nanai Road in Patong as a stopgap until we found something better.

Also, we were involved in an accident on the motorbike yesterday afternoon.  My wife was driving west on Prachanukhro Road in Patong with me sitting behind her on the bike rather than in the sidecar.  She turned left onto Thaweewong (the beach road) towards the Amari Resort going a bit too fast (it's a rather sharp turn made worse by the cones in the middle of the road placed there when Patong went to it's poorly-thought-out one-way routing system).  The sidecar wheel came off the ground and I could feel us going over.  Tim served back into the middle of the road smashing into the rear quarter-panel of a minibus (my right arm and knee as well as the handlebar of the bike took the brunt of the collision).

Of course the collision took place right in front of a grouping of the motorbike taxi-mafia guys so I knew immediately I'd be paying out a wad of cash as any accident is always the fault of the farang even when he's just the passenger.  The minibus driver actually knew Tim so we could have gotten off easy if it wasn't for the mafia guys who insisted that the police (whom these particular motorbike taxi's pay bribes to for their primo spot on the beach).  The taxi driver needed to save face so he suggested that he call his insurance agent and I agreed we needed to keep the insurance people happy.  Smiles all around until Tim took off to look for her friend who was babysitting Alex on the beach.  I started to walk up after her and the motorbike guys thought I was trying to sneak away and started making a big fuss and wouldn't let me walk too far.

Anwyay, eventually the insurance man showed up with a camera.  Tim was still off looking for her friend and son and suddenly the minibus driver didn't seem to understand English anymore.  The insurance man had a digital camera and began taking photos of the front of the minibus (the license plate was slightly bent but NOT from this accident as we only hit the rear of the vehicle) and small dents on the LEFT side rather than the RIGHT side.  At least the driver respected his friendship with Tim (he's somehow related to Jum) enough that he figured out a potential scam and directed the agent to the damage we actually caused (a three-inch dent and some scraped paint).  I tried to point out my spraped and bruised elbow and knee but he didn't seem too interested.

Tim arrived just in time for me to be presented with a bill for 4,500 baht which was a lot less than I'd expected (Tim's last accident had cost me ten times this amount!).  My wife tried to argue (in times like these, I question that she's really a Thai person as she can argue with the best of them — a totally un-Thai-like quality) but I soon quieted her down.  I did make the insurance man (not to mention everybody else) a bit nervous when I asked for a receipt and his card; I settled for a hand-written receipt and the minibus driver's cellular number.  Through it all I just kept smiling.

It just figures that this happened on the one day that I didn't bring my camera along...

I soothed Tim on the drive along the beach road; she was more worried about the money than anything else (why do these accidents always happen right after I transfer cash to put into our local accounts?).  She was very impressed with how cool I was during the entire situation particularly when the motorbike taxi guys began raising a fuss.  We've all heard about other farangs who don't stay calm in similar situations and really bad things end up happening to them (like death in a few cases).  You just have to understand the "system" and accept it when confronted with it; you don't have to agree with how certain things "work" but you must remember that we are still the "foreigners" and a minority of people will always try to take advantage of that...

TWO-TIERED PRICING & OUTRIGHT ROBBERY

I've come to accept the system of two-tiered pricing in Thailand — that farangs are expected to pay slightly higher prices than Thai people for admission to national parks, the zoo, etc.  When bargaining at open air markets, I know that as a Westerner I'll never be able to get the same price that my wife will pay.  What I take exception to is that occasionally greed takes over in certain situations; fortunately, before this week, I'd only heard stories from other foreigners rather than experiencing any obvious price-gouging for myself.

In the past few days I've been the victim of two incidents of attempted highway robbery of the greed-induced variety.  In one I was able to come away relatively unscathed.  I'm just now dealing with the second.

With our current (lack of) water situation it's needless to say that tempers are beginning to flare.  We still are unable to receive any kind of answer as to when running water will be restored and my landlord became irate with me the other day when I asked (it was the first time I'd seen him or asked the question; he's from Grenada by the way).  We'd been buying large jugs of drinking water every day until that supply diminished and a community well was soon emptied as well.  Finally, the village council ordered a daily delivery from a water truck.  Water was to be provided to each house in our soi; the council paid for the water each day and they were to fill up as many containers of water as we had at no extra cost.

Apparently, the guys on the water truck decided they would try to make some extra cash on the side.  I was working in my office two nights ago when my wife burst inside yelling that I needed to tell the water man to give us water.  Tim rarely becomes angry with anything so I asked her what had happened.

"I don't know why water man speak not nice to me."

She went on to say that she'd gone out front and showed the men on the water truck where our buckets were (we have two round plastic garbage cans, a medium-sized ice chest, and two small pails for bailing water out of the big buckets when they're full).  He told her 100 baht.  Tim, remembering I'd told her the water was free, asked him again and he'd yelled at her that he'd said 100 baht — not 100 dollars (knowing I was a farang).  That's when she came to get me.

I walked outside and asked which of the three men told my wife that the water was 100 baht.  One of the men said that she misunderstood and that it was 100 baht for each container so I needed to pay 500 baht!  Just then, our landlord walked into view so I called out to him that they were trying to rip us off.  Normally, Jon is a very soft-spoken gentleman but he became very irate and began yelling that they'd already paid for the entire water delivery and that the men needed to fill up our buckets and I wasn't to pay them anything.  (In Thailand, you simply do not show anger towards a Thai as it never has a positive affect.  Jon's lived here for nine years and he knows how the system works but you can tell that the constant complaints about the lack of water, etc. is really taking it's toll on him.)  Our buckets did get filled but there was a lot of tension left hanging in the air.  I kept waiing and apologizing to diffuse the situation and was very happy when the truck moved to the next house.

Afterwards, Nadier told me that he'd paid the man 1000 baht two days before and Franz said he'd paid 100 baht.  Neither knew that the council had already paid for our water until they'd heard Jon yelling at the men on the truck.  Pen also told me that the girls living in the house next to her had been complaining the men had been trying to charge them every day and they had refused knowing it was supposed to me free.  Thus, they had been borrowing water from other neighbors.  I think that a representative of the council should meet the truck from now on and accompany it to each house to make sure this doesn't happen again.

If it was only a couple of days that we'd have to rely on this water truck then I probably would have just paid the 100 baht (or even the 500 baht) and accepted it as part of the system (although I'm still not happy about a Thai man being rude to my wife — perhaps he's actually Burmese or something...).  But we have no idea how long this will continue (11 days without running water and counting...).  Someone from our soi did call the main office of the Water Authority in Bangkok a couple of days ago and a couple of other people are writing letters to the Phuket Gazette so we'll see what happens...

The second attempt (successful) at "robbery" was not so easily diverted, if much less dramatic.  In Thailand, if you are farang and involved in an accident you are always at fault no matter how many witnesses you might have that state otherwise.  (I'm not sure what happens if two farangs are in an accident together; they're probably still in the wrong and the settlement goes to the street vendor at the corner.)  My wife is a very cautious driver but driving is chaotic here at best so it's just a matter of time before any one person is involved in some sort of accident.  We had a near miss on New Year's Eve but that was just a slight scrape.

A couple of nights ago (yes, the same evening of the "water incident") Tim was leaving work when she ran into a car on her motorbike.  Now, I'm not sure of the amount of damage to the car   Tim told me "car broken" and showed me some nasty-looking scrapes on her knee.  She waited until tonight before telling me as she was worried that I'd be angry about paying money since we'd just paid Alexander's tuition on Monday.  Ordinarily, since it was a Thai-on-Thai accident the money paid would be minimal (although most drivers have some form of insurance usually one just pays cash on the spot).

But Tim managed to run into the brand-new car of her boss as driven by his wife.  They know that she is married to an American (which most Thai people automatically think means "big money").  She says that she had no choice but to give them what they asked for — she hasn't told me how much but I'd just transferred some cash over from the States and gave her a nice amount to deposit into her account.  That's gone now, plus more (she had my debit card as I'd asked her to pick up something at Jungceylon on her break; I haven't checked how much yet...).

I could tell she was very upset when she told me as she was more worried about the money than the accident itself.  I told her that the money wasn't the important thing — I made sure she was okay (and was happy Alexander wasn't with her at the time).  Accidents do happen — you can't really plan for them — we'll be okay regardless of how much she had to pay her boss's wife.  I do know that if it had been somebody who doesn't know she's married to a farang that Tim probably would have gotten off by paying one or two thousand baht at the most.

I had wondered why she hadn't gone to work last night (she said she wanted to take us to the Wat Chalong Fair instead and asked Jum to tell the boss she wasn't going to work).  Tonight, Tim told me that she didn't have to work but needed to go talk to the "big boss" about something and would be home within an hour or so.  She left around 5:30 and didn't come home until almost 1:00 (I'd called her twice and both times she'd said the boss was too busy to talk to her but she would wait because it was important).

At least when I get my Thai driver's license, I can pay the Thai prices at the zoo, aquarium, etc.  Too bad that won't work at the market, with the water guy, or when we have fender-benders.

Maybe I need to have a t-shirt made up that says, "I'm American but I'm not 'big money'..."