Daily Archives: May 24, 2006

I have been reading the entries on Thai-Blogs for over a year now, and decided that it is time to share some of my experiences in Thailand.
Back in 1975 I went to Thailand in the Peace Corps, where I worked as an engineer helping design and build small dams and related structures. Then three years ago my wife and I went to Thailand on vacation, and liked it so much that we went back a year later with our two sons. I am now planning to retire in 1-3 years or so, at which point my wife and I would like to move to Thailand for at least a few years. As part of my research into this move, I found thai-blogs.com and have greatly enjoyed the contributions of other writers here.
I do not know how often I will post here, but I will start by telling a little about the language training we received. There were eight Peace Corps Volunteers [PCVs] in my group, and we were taken to Pak Chong [up toward Korat] for our language training. They immediately started us learning to read Thai script, but their real focus was on teaching us to communicate, rather than the niceties of grammar or syntax. In the picture you can see what one of our classrooms looked like. The posters have the Thai alphabet color-coded to help us recognize which letters made which sounds. We were housed in a cluster of bungalows at the edge of town, but ate all of our meals at restaurants in town, and after only four days of training, our instructors took us into town for lunch and then disappeared. If we wanted to eat, we had to figure out how to order it ourselves! And we did. We didn’t always get what we expected, but it was usually good, and we quickly learned to trust the good nature and friendliness of the Thai people.

Our training also took us out of Bangkok and into a small city on the border between Isaan and the rest of the country. Five of us had just received degrees in engineering, one was a fisheries major, and I don’t remember what the other two had studied, but in addition to our language studies, our instructors took us on numerous field trips to help us become familiar with the vocabulary and situations that we would be working with after our training. And occasionally, we would just “bai tio” and go have some fun!

### this is not a blog – it is a question! please use our forums to ask questions www.thailandQA.com ##

I hope that the readers take this question seriously, and do not redirect this question towards Bar-girls and Drug users.
With the number of HIV positive people in Thailand so high, and growing, this epidemic is effecting all of us, because each year a larger and larger number of HIV positive people do not know that they have been infected. I am talking about the nice girl or boy next door, or your friend/lover, that was not been fateful.
A blood test is the only way, that i know of, to make sure that a person has not been infected with the Aids virus, and is not HIV positive. So, when i was working in the Medical profession, in the USA, i would normally give blood twice a year, because i knew that if i was HIV positive, they would not use my blood, and notify me that i had tested positive. The cost to have your blood tested in the USA is over $200.00, and this way my blood was being used for a good cause. I did this because in the USA, a patient does not have to tell his doctor or health care professionals that they are HIV positive. And because i was required, on a daily bases, to treat people with open wounds.
That is how i dealt with the problem personally, but my question is, how do you ask your new GF/BF to get a blood test, before you start french kissing them? This may be a blunt way of putting it, but i am sure that you will see the dilemma.