G'day Australia!

G’day! Expat wife is finally Down Under and connected to the world again via the wonders of the Internet. It has been almost three weeks since we left the Land of Smiles but it seems more like three months. We’ve taken four flights, explored two cities, met a lot of people, including a whole brood of family members, and we’re now living a completely different life to that in Thailand. Let’s go back to the beginning and gradually make our way up to our present location, the remote town of Karratha.

The first stop, via Kuala Lumpur, was Adelaide, home to most of my dad’s side of the family. The Husband hadn’t met any of the Aussie contingent present during our visit, but bore up under the pressure pretty well seemed to pass the test with flying colours. I hadn’t seen any of them (and there are a lot – dad has three sisters and a brother and each of them is married with at least three children) in over nine years and met three of my cousins for the first time as they had all come into existence since my last visit. It was a wonderful way to start our new adventure in Australia and we were buoyed by the feeling that we weren’t quite so far from all our family.

So The Husband’s first experience of Australia was Adelaide, a fine city with which to be introduced to this vast and varied country. It’s a city much overlooked by tourists, which probably adds to its appeal. In Sydney or Melbourne you can be surrounded by people with guide books and cameras, talking a multitude of languages. In Adelaide, almost everyone’s a local so you don’t feel like you’re just one of thousands on the tourist trail. Having arrived early in the morning following a flight involving very little sleep, we knew we needed to keep active in order to prevent jet lag from setting in so, a couple of coffees later, we went out with three of the cousins to wander around the city.

After recovering from the realisation that the cousin who was eleven the last time I saw him was taller than me, could legally drink and was permitted to be in charge of a motorised vehicle, I relaxed and started to take in the sights. The weather was glorious – warm but not too hot, with bright blue skies and not a raincloud in sight – and served to show Adelaide in all its glory. The sun glinted off the few skyscrapers and gave the old sandstone buildings of the law courts, the state library, South Australian Museum, Art Gallery of South Australia and university buildings, a warm glow. The beautiful day inspired us to go walk to Central Market to pick up some bread, cheese and sausages for a picnic lunch in the Botanical Gardens. The undercover market teems with independently owned stalls selling everything from fruit and veg, freshly baked bread and speciality cheeses, to dim sum, coffee and flowers and, left to my own devices, I could have meandered up and down the aisles for hours. However, with four hungry boys in tow there was no time for dilly dallying - we picked up our baguettes, ciabatta rolls, Brie, Cheddar, Ambrosia and spicy sausages and quickly headed out to picnic on the grass under a powder blue, cloudless sky.

That night, we saw something quite remarkable. After an Italian meal in a bustling restaurant, we headed down to North Terrace, a section of road in the centre of the city that is home to some of Adelaide’s finest old buildings. We had seen them earlier in the day but not like this – the buildings were lit up with a dazzling array of colours in a variety of patterns, some were distinctly William Morris-esque, others of an Aboriginal design, whilst others took the spectator into the realms of fantasy. Dubbed the Northern Lights, the light installation is the largest of its type ever displayed in Australia and was truly spectacular. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. We topped off the night by ambling down to the riverside to see aforementioned drinking, driving (not concurrently, one hopes!), tall cousin play the guitar and sing as part of a band performing at a medical students do. Standing under the stars, listening to music waft over us on the cool air, we both decided that we liked Adelaide very much indeed.

Farewell Pattaya, Hello Karratha!

Expat Wife would like to apologise profusely for the lack of blogs over the past week. There is, however, a fairly good reason for this. The project on which The Husband has been working for the past fifteen months is coming to an end and we are leaving Thailand. I am currently packing up the flat and getting ready to bid farewell to Pattaya in a couple of days. There is so much we will miss - the inexpensiveness of pretty much everything (except for wine - the one drawback!), being able to walk down to the beach, having a sea view (well, if you squint!), the year-round wonderful weather, the friendliness of the people, the fabulous holidays we have enjoyed in this country... the list is long and I could go on. Of course, there are things that I won't miss, and if you regularly read my blog you will know what they are, but more often than not they are more a source of mirth than anything else. At the end of the day, we have been visitors in their country - there are certain things you just have to grin and bear. Mai pen rai and all that!

The good news is that our departure from Thailand does not signal the end of the adventure, for we are on to pastures new. I shall soon be Expat Wife in Australia! This may not seem much of an adventure - after all, the national language is English, it's a first world country and I actually have a large amount of family there. We will not be living in any of the cities, however. In fact, we will not be anywhere near a city. We are moving to Karratha, over 1500km north of Perth (the nearest city), pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It is a town built purely to house workers mining iron ore and, later, other big companies using the region's natural resources - before 1968 it was a remote cattle station. The town has grown and modernised over the years but it is hardly a bustling metropolis. Expat Wife likes her shops, restaurants and bars so it will be interesting to see how she adapts to life in remote Western Australia. At least the wine will be cheap!

Maid In Thailand

Most expats in Thailand employ cleaners to come in once or twice a week. Labour is so cheap here compared to the UK that it just makes sense. Why clean your flat yourself when you can get someone to come in and do a better job than you for a few quid a week? At least, that was the idea when we signed up to have the resident maids clean the flat twice a week and change our towels and sheets once weekly. In the fourteen months we have been living in the flat, a plethora of maids have trooped in and out with their mops and buckets. A couple of them left in the high season in search of jobs in the big hotels but most of them have been fired for being, quite frankly, hopeless.

When we first moved in, a two-woman act were in force, cleaning our flat with military efficiency. As soon as they walked in, each knew exactly what they had to do. They had assigned themselves different rooms and would sweep through, leaving not a mite of dust nor a speck of dirt. They got on with the job and cleaned for a good hour between them without faffing or calling up their boyfriend, mum and twenty of their closest friends. Unfortunately, they left after a few months, off to a big, shiny, new hotel. The woman who replaced them had obviously never heard that Thailand is the Land of Smiles. She managed not to crack a smile the entire length of her employment (which was, thankfully, fairly brief). I have never met a grumpier Thai than she. Upon opening the door to her, she would indicate the bucket beside her feet with a brief flick of her eyes and a grunt. I would smile, greet her in Thai and beckon her in. Her expression would not alter from the permanent frown that unattractively pulled down both sides of her face, presumably from decades of grumpiness. In her gloom, even picking her feet off the floor would be too much and so she would shuffle in, ignoring me, and proceed directly to the back bedroom where she would slop a dirty mop around the floor a few times, change the towels and sheets and leave.

The owners of the flats quickly realised that her employment was a mistake (though you would have thought they would have noticed her sullenness when they first met her, unless of course she forced all the cheeriness she allocated herself for the year into that interview) and got rid of her promptly. Her replacement was her antithesis. Bubbly and friendly, she would grant me a huge smile each time she saw me and would ask me, in her gradually improving English (she was trying hard to speak it as often as possible in order to become more fluent), how I was. She was in her mid-twenties and would quietly hum to herself as she worked, occasionally asking me questions about my family, my background or my job. One day, as soon as she walked into the flat, she excitedly burst out, "Emily, Emily, guess what? Guess what?" She had a new boyfriend and wanted to tell me all about him. She used the same opening before telling me about a part-time job she'd been hired to do, working in a restaurant in the evenings. It didn't take much for her to practically burst with excitement. She would laugh and smile and her enthusiasm for life in general was infectious. She was also an expert in the art of towel creations, something she'd learnt in a hotel. A couple of times she came bounding out from the bedroom, saying she wanted to show me something, a grin wide across her face. The first time she had made a rabbit and the second a pair of swans, facing each other as if they were kissing. She was too much of a people person to stay here, working alone, and eventually she too left to work at a hotel at which she would be amongst lots of other hotel workers with whom she could gossip to her heart's content.

When she left, a mother and daughter team stepped in. The daughter looked as if she was thirteen at most so she had probably just left school - in Thailand compulsory, government-funded schooling ends at age twelve. She clearly did not want to be cleaning other people's homes with her mum and I can't say that I blamed her. She followed her mum around with a scowl but, unlike, the grumpy shuffler, she didn't look like the world had defeated her, she merely possessed a healthy adolescent condescension of everything and everyone but her friends. I don't think she really did very much and her mother would regularly berate her for this and that. In fact, I think she spent more time telling her daughter what to do than actually cleaning. As a consequence, our flat was rarely cleaned well. They lasted about three weeks.

The girl that took over from them was only a few years older than the one she replaced, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and was more interested in ensuring her hair was smooth and falling prettily over her face than mopping a floor and wiping down a table. She dressed in skinny jeans and an assortment of different baby tees and strappy tops, co-ordinating them with beads and jangly bracelets. Hardly appropriate attire for scrubbing and mopping and spraying and wiping. Unsurprisingly, not much of any of that was actually done. Whereas the two women who first cleaned for us spent an hour between them and the bubbly girl would often take a couple of hours before she was finished, this girl was in and out within half an hour (having chatted to her friends on her mobile for probably half of that time), leaving tables and counter tops untouched and the floor only quickly mopped. On the day she left (I scarcely need mention that she was fired and did not leave of her own accord) she brought in a friend to help her who, amazingly, was even worse. She had no idea what she was doing and picked up bottles of cleaning fluid with two fingers, scanning the labels with a bemused expression as if she'd never seen cleaning products in her life before. She insisted on carrying around a tiny handbag across her body which must have dangled irritatingly whenever she bent over to scrub something. Which probably meant she didn't. Most frustrating was when I asked her to change the sheets, pulling them off to illustrate my point. She looked puzzled but nodded her head and said yes. I had to go out and I returned to find that the sheets had not been changed. She hadn't understood a word I had said but, rather than admitting that, she indicated that she had. It's a face-saving device that many Thais adopt and that drives me up the wall.

The two current maids wear loose polo shirts, which I have taken to be a good sign. They know what the job entails, are there to to do it properly, and dress appropriately. The sheets and towels were changed on their first visit which is also a step in the right direction. It remains to be seen whether they will be be fired or will be here for a while!

Stray Cat Boarding House

In true Thai style, our building has adopted two cats, a big ugly tom called, appropriately, Tom, and a skinny female called Pinky. At least, they are the names given to them by the owner of the development, a bubbly middle-aged American who dresses every day in one of an assortment of floaty floral shirts and co-ordinated trousers. Good-intentioned Buddhists often 'adopt' stray dogs or cats, leaving food out for them and petting them but unfortunately that only deepens the problem by allowing the stray population to grow. The stray animal population in Thailand is massive - millions of dogs and cats endure a miserable life on the streets, scavenging and often fighting for food. Many of them end up diseased, with open sores and extreme hair loss, or they are hit by motorbikes or pick-up trucks and die slowly and painfully from untreated injuries.

Luckily for Pinky and Tom, Jill has stuck by them for years, feeding them regularly and playing with them in her little office on the ground floor of our apartment block. She has had them both neutered so that they won't breed and contribute to the growing population of strays and they now live at Butterfly Garden pretty much permanently. Tom, however, does have a habit of wandering off for days at a time, only to come back covered with scratches and bite marks. He acts all macho and tough but, if his injuries are anything to go by, seems to be a terrible fighter. Then again, maybe he's thinking, "you should see the other tom!". Pinky is a permanent fixture and can often be found sleeping on the roof of one of the cars in the car park. As soon as she sees us, she stretches out onto her back, paws in the air, ready for a stroke. She also enjoys playing with bikini strap tops, as I found to my detriment one sunny day by the pool. I was lying on my front, straps untied and dangling down, when Pinky came meandering along, hiding in the shade under my lounger. Spying one of the bright red straps, swaying gently in the breeze, she pounced and began pawing one of the straps, obviously thinking it was a great game, before attempting to by walk off with it her mouth. I grabbed it from her just before I became known as 'that flasher from England' and she slunk off underneath the lounger again, indignant that her game had been curtailed. She then immediately noticed the strap on the other side and jumped at it, biting down on it, walking away and then pinging it back at me, as if as a punishment for ruining her fun.

Cats may be cute but they can be little terrors.

Just Because I Am White Does Not Mean I am Russian

I have today been pondering a question I have asked myself many times before; why do so many Russians in this city assume that all other white people are also Russian? Despite the hordes of Russian tourists and menus and signs written in the Russian script, we are in fact in Thailand. At any one time, Pattaya will be teeming with Non-Thai tourists and residents from across the globe. You just have to walk down the street, hearing a multitude of different languages being spoken, to appreciate how varied the nationalities in this seaside resort are. I can only presume that it is the general feeling of superiority that many of the Russians here seem to possess that leads them to talk to everybody they come in contact with in Russian. Although much of the time, from the surprise in their expressions and voices when I answer them in English, I do genuinely think that I am mistaken for being Russian, I have often seen them speak to Thai people in Russian. They just expect everyone else to be able to speak their language, despite the fact that it is far from widely spoken outside of their own country. What's worse is the frequency with which they get angry and impatient with the poor Thais for not being able to understand them when they bark an order in Russian at them.

I have lost count of the number of times that someone has stopped me and said something very quickly in Russian, clearly assuming I will understand what they are saying. At the beach, on the street, by the pool and, today, in the supermarket. I was at the check-out, waiting for a poor student cashier to work out exactly what he was supposed to do when someone gave him cash, when a plump middle-aged woman in a sack of a dress turned to me, rolled her eyes and said something derogatory, motioning her head to the teenager so I was left with no doubt who she was talking about. He was wearing a badge that informed shoppers that he was a student so it was probably his first day on some sort of work experience programme. He was completely flustered and clearly embarrassed about not knowing how to open the till and this horrible woman was alternating between huffing and puffing and laughing at his expense. You didn't need to know Russian to understand what she was saying. I tried to ignore her but she would not stop talking to me in Russian, her conspiratorial manner communicating that she clearly assumed I was one of her fellow countrymen and therefore of the same opinions as her. All I could do when the young cashier scanned my shopping was smile a lot, thank him profusely at the end and hope that he didn't think I had anything to do with that nasty woman.

A Little Afternoon Entertainment

The complete lack of Health & Safety in this country never fails to amaze me. Sometimes though I really think it's more to do with laziness than lack of knowledge. It's just so much easier not to have to bother with all the extra hassle involved in ensuring that someone doesn't maim themselves or die. The Thais are generally a very laidback people who would far rather have a good gossip with their mates or a sleep in a hammock (these ingenious sleeping aids can be found all over the country, strung up between signposts, tree trunks, wooden posts, wherever possible) than do something as strenuous as work.

I was at a friend's house the other day when a few labourers wandered in to brick up a gap in the top of the wall bordering the garden. Their 'scaffolding' consisted of a few thin planks of wood and a bench which needed to be somehow nailed together. The young Thai guy, wearing jeans slung so low they rested just below his bottom (luckily, unlike the Russian woman on the escalator, he was wearing underwear) and a beanie, looked at all the offcuts with a slightly bemused expression on his face before picking a couple of planks up at random and nailing them together. My friend and I, on sunbeds facing the wall and thus with a with a prime position to watch this spectacle unfold, glanced at each other with knowing looks and barely concealed smiles. This was going to be interesting. The poor man probably felt more than slightly self-conscious knowing that we were watching his every move but he acted like it was all a breeze. Or perhaps he just really didn't care.

The scaffolding slowly went up, looking more precarious with every hammered nail. It was when he grabbed the wobbly bench-type-thing and proceeded to nail it to a couple of pieces wood, creating a platform that sloped at an angle more suited to a child's slide, that our laughter bubbled up and escaped from our mouths. Even Lily, my friend's two year old daughter, pointed at it and said "uh oh!" He seemed non-plussed, evidently considering his creation a success. Until, that was, the two female workers he arrived with returned, saw the mess he had made, pointed at it, said something in Thai that sounded very like an admonishment and then laughed themselves. He then proceeded to sheepishly take apart his hastily nailed together death-trap before putting up something slightly safer under the strict supervision of the women.

Perhaps I need to amend my earlier statement - Thai men can be rather work-shy at times but the majority of the women pull their fair share of the weight, and often rather more than they should of the men's.

Shopping Centre Flashers

Pattaya is home to two beach-front shopping centres, providing a cool respite for over-sunned holiday makers and locals alike. It's the air conditioning that draws many of the Thais, which is why you'll see lots of people wandering about but hardly anybody actually in the over-priced shops. Some won't have air-conditioning at home so flock to one of the shopping centres for a hit of cold air. Others fancy a bit of gentle exercise without the sun blazing down on them, though at the speed at which they meander and the fact that they refuse to walk up the escalators (and often infuriatingly stand two abreast on the same step, completely blocking the way for anybody who doesn't consider loitering on escalators a fun way to pass the time), I can't imagine they'll see a massive rise in their fitness levels.

The tourists often hit the shops when they've had a bit too much sun, evidenced by the vast numbers of severely sunburnt shoppers hobbling around in the blissful cool of the air-conditioning. Upon discovering that they resemble a cherry tomato after applying oil without SPF and frying themselves in the Thai sun, all the blistering tourist has to do is walk the few steps from the beach to the shopping centre. Unfortunately, it is this close proximity to the beach that has given so many farangs the mistaken belief that is perfectly acceptable to walk around half-dressed. It is not uncommon to see women dressed in hotpants so tiny they may as well just be wearing a pair of French knickers. I have witnessed more wobbly thighs bounding out of impossibly short, hideously tight dresses than anybody should ever have to see. When will women learn that white Lycra is not anybody's friend? And just because you're wearing a G-string rather than a full pair of knickers does not make wearing transparent clothing acceptable. In fact it makes it so much worse. No-one wants to see that.

The prize for the most inappropriately dressed person in a shopping centre goes to the Russian woman we saw at the weekend. She was clothed in what can only be described as a long t-shirt. Unfortunately for us, standing below her on the escalator, it wasn't long enough. The fact that she was either sporting the skimpiest thong known to mankind or was going commando didn't help matters. From our position several steps down from her, we had a clear view of two bare, rather saggy and wrinkly buttocks poking out of the bottom of her 'dress'. It was not a pleasant sight. Perhaps because she has to wear ten layers for the majority of the year in Russia, she felt as if she had to make the most of being able to show her bottom and not get hypothermia. Whatever the reason, I really wish she hadn't.