Daily Archives: June 14, 2005

Monkeys playing around a Buddha image in Lopburi

The Thai Blogs are now receiving a daily readership of about 2,000-3,000 people. That is pretty good considering we have been online only about five months. I am very pleased with the direction the blogs are taking. We now have a good collection of bloggers from all walks of life. All of them are writing about Thai life and Thai culture from their own unique viewpoint. It is great that we have not only expats writing but also Thai people living abroad and inside Thailand.

As we have so many new people, I thought I would take this opportunity to explain a bit about the background of Thai Blogs and also show how things work around here. The idea about the blogs was first conceived at the All About Thailand Forums in August 2004. It was a good concept but it kind of fizzled out after a while. I was a bit frustrated with the limitations of the blog program. Then our friend Stacker from the forums suggested a free program by b2evolution. I fell in love with it straight away. I sounded out some ideas with SiamJai and we decided to go ahead with a new domain name of thai-blogs.com in January 2005. SteveSuphan was also one of the founding members.

You can look at past blogs by using the calendar which is in the right-hand column. If you click on the month, you will then see all the blogs for that month. If you click on the date, then you will see all the blogs posted on that day. Click on the back arrow and then you will see all the blogs for the previous months.

Below I have provided convenient links for all the months since the blogs started. There is a lot of good information here and it is worthing looking over. I have written over 190 blogs myself. Since January I have been writing nearly every day.

August 2004 | September 2004 | October 2005 | November 2004 | December 2004 | January 2005 | February 2005 | March 2005 | April 2005 | May 2005

On the front page of Thai Blogs, you will see the latest blogs written by all of the bloggers. If you only want to see the blogs of a particular blogger, then click on their name in the top right hand corner. All new bloggers start out in the “Guest Bloggers” section. If you click on my name, for example, you will see that the calendar and archives list has changed. These are now just for me.

At the bottom of each blog, there is a link for “Leave a comment”. As soon as someone has left a comment this then changes to “1 comment”. All bloggers appreciate your feedback as this is what keeps us coming back to write more. If we don’t think anyone is reading the blogs, we wouldn’t write any more! At the top of the page you can see a link for “latest comments” so that you can see what people have been commenting about recently.

We welcome any new bloggers. If you have something to say on the subject of Thailand then please click here.

If you own a web site or belong to a mailing list, then we would be very happy if you could help promote Thai-Blogs.com. Feel free to link to the front page of our web site.

Since I have been studying in Bkk, I’ve found my English very useful. Foreigners just bump into me with questions themselves especially foreigners asking which train to get on the sky train always.

I’ve met and and listened to many types of questions from funny one like
“Do Thai people just learn how to park in order to get driver license??,” asked my American teacher everytime he experienced heavy traffic on his road home.

or a bit silly plus funny like,
“Do you have to ride on an elephant to school everyday?” and
“Do you wear national costume (with lots of gold and heavy stuff) everytime you go outside?”

Some quite piss me off;
“Is being prostitude very popular there?” “Are you planning to be one?!” – -”

Or even questions from a guy my age..sort of flirting me lol!!
“Ey, can I borrow your mobile?”
“What for?”
“To give you my number so we can contact later” and etc.

But those are just simple to me..I can remember one question with a face of person who asked so well..
“How can you trust your king?” asked American teacher in Japanese school.
I was quite shocked. Well, if you’re Thai, you will understand my feeling. King’s somebody high here who we cannot cite in ordinarily daily conversation that much. We talk about him (King Rama 9) sometimes, anyway, but only about good things he’s done and given his people. I knot my brows and still kept quiet.

“I mean, you know, in America, we are able to talk and criticize them if we see there’s something weird going on or if he’s behaving badly”
“How can you know for real if all medias and monarch institution themselves ignore to be open for everything?..no medias are allowed or most are scared to criticize them, am I right?”
I wasn’t feeling like my country and my king have been insulted or anything. I totally understood that ..it’s all because ‘we’re different’ so I decided to say something,
“Yeah, you’re right, man. It’s said in the constitution that we cannot cite his name indiscriminately because we’re just normal people.. we are likely to lack of careness. We may unintentionally say bad things about him which can be misunderstood that it leads to disparagement.”

“And so far, have you ever seen or heard anything bad about him? I know medias aren’t that brave to investigate or widely spread the news but all of us, Thai people, have seen is his careness, hopefulness and generosity. He’s done such good things for us like fake rains for farmers in barren areas, for instance.”

He still kept asking, “Well, yeah..but that’s because you really don’t know anything for real about him and his royal realtives. Medias just spread only good news about them, right?”
“Actually, according to your knowledge about my country and my king, I guess you must have known that we’re democratic country, too. Although, we’re unable to criticize our king but if there’s something really wrong about him and his royal family. If they’re behaving badly..taking advantages from his people. Noone’s going to be silent for sure, I believe.”

And I left to present my speech because it was my last day in Japanese school. I’m quite sure he might have lots of other questions to ask still :p

Anyway, there’s nothing wrong in this whole round world. C’mon man, stuff is right or wrong depends upon what criterias the society and the world use to judge. We’re just born in different places.

PS. I’d still love to hear and reply all questions by the way!