The ancient capital of Ayutthaya
To bring in the one year, and nearing 100,000 words of thai-blogs I thought I would take the opportunity this week, with the gifted advice of the webmaster once again, to write up a three part mini-series on my own ‘top-ten’ blogs of the year.
But before that, I would first like to thank all the readers for turning thai-blogs.com into the biggest blogspot about Thailand on the Net. I pride myself in that thai-blogs has risen to the top without having to succumb to the same old ‘Thai girlie bar theme’ which plaques other related blogspots and especially forums.
So, how did I get started at thai-blogs? Quite simply I had been a regular at thailandlife forums for a while and after writing up a successful topic starter entitled ‘Dos and don’ts…of dating a ‘proper’ Thai girl’, it was Richard the Webmaster himself who invited me to post at thai-blogs. The rest of the story is history.
It wasn’t exactly easy composing such a list but I finally chose the ones, which after having been written, gave me the inspiration for future blogs along the same lines. Others in the list either accidentally brought in a whole load of new readers or were chosen by myself personally as being some of my better work. Some of the blogs on the list may surprise a lot of you and especially the one which I have chosen at number two which turned into one of the most talked about ex-pat stories in my hometown of Suphanburi and even made the rounds in the backpacker community. Literary scared the wits out of a darned lotta people.
So here it is:
I hadn’t been around at thai-blogs that long and was still wondering to just how many folks out there were actually reading my quack-wack blogs. The pretty horrific story of the birth of my daughter, was my ‘foot in the door’ at thai-blogs – N’Candy struck a chord with a lot of the readers and I was delighted with the warm response I received. Even this year, on meeting up with a few of the folks here at thai-blogs, one of the first things I was asked was along the lines of….“So, how is N’Candy doing?” Since I wrote up that blog, not much has changed and Candy is still in Ayutthaya with her grandmother. I’m still planning to take charge of her this coming school year and put her into kindergarten here in Suphanburi after I heard through the grapevine that Candy’s mom hasn’t even been bothered to return home and visit her for the past three months. Now, let’s not get too personal here Steve! Oooops… The story of N’Candy made the list in that it was the first blog that had me realize the scope, numbers, and kind-heartedness of our readers. It was also my only truly ‘personal’ blog which wasn’t witty in anyway!
9) The Funnier Side of Teaching
This one made the top-ten as it was the first blog to reveal the real ins and outs and a behind the scenes look at teaching. Unfortunately, it wasn’t read that much when it originally made the main page which was a kind of a pity, as I felt at the time, that I had really let loose a few of own pretty confidential ‘teaching stories’. It was also the first blog that helped inspire other quite personal insights and loads more blog-stuff on teaching in Thailand. After a good response from some readers who either commented or mailed me saying that they’d like to read other privatey kinda stuff, I continue to keep up with that style of content til this day.
It had originally been entitled ‘Doin The Bust’ but I changed that to ‘Working Undercover’ after advice from the Webmaster. It was the first and only blog that ‘really’ spilled the beans! I had to stick this into my top-ten of the year just for ‘originalities’ sake. You’re gonna find it hard trying to come across another such story on the Net. It was a completely true story which told the time of being employed by a film firm, on a part-time basis, to help bust counterfeiters knocking off dodgy DVDs on the streets of Bangkok. That was one blog which I dug out of the archives as I had originally written it up to sell off to a Bangkok based publication. We argued a bit over the length of the story and the low fee offered and eventually, I never did bother selling it to them. My longest blog to date and was spiced up even more after the webmaster stuck in headlines along the lines of ‘I was an undercover cop!’ Not my finest piece of writing but the story is a pretty unique one…to say the least!
I had been having a bevvie at the local shop near my school, when the owner ‘Mrs. Auntie’ pointed out to me a fascinating story in the Thai Raj newspaper about this ex-convict who had been arrested and immediately freed after he had been caught eating the remains of a local grannie whose body had been rest to lay in the woods before her cremation day. After reading that, I just had to write a blog and the result, in my opinion, was pretty good. It reached my top-ten as it had me realize how much of a treasure trove of Thai stories there were, which had never been translated into English. The Webmaster cottoned onto the potential of such stories straight away, and now , 8 months later, I am currently working on translating other weird but wonderful stories for my latest ‘Thai Stories Section’ at learningthai.com.
Will be back with some more…very soon.
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