Author Archives: Siam Jai

This month we celebrate the second anniversary of our Thai-blog community. What better occasion to recall the past and pay a brief visit the story of how it all started. We have to go back quite a while ago… please follow me.

Where it all began
Once upon a time there was a forum as part of a website called thailandguidebook.com. On this forum, some members started to write regularly about their Thai experiences. It was a diverse bunch even back then: temporary teachers, backpackers, and some expats like yours truly. Even Richard found some spare time and shared language study tips he gained while teaching his students at Srinai.

Shortly thereafter, these stories were moved outside the forum, so as to not look like posts. This was the first time they started to resemble today’s blogs – but they were very, very basic. Just plain text paragraphs, that’s it. Things like the calendar, RSS, blog-search – basically all the bells and whistles that we take for granted in today’s blogs, were nonexistent at that time. Writer profiles were those of the forum; comments were also collected as forum posts. I remember, each of us writers had their separate subforum for blog comments, and we responded there.

The lonely blogger
This highlighted an obvious problem: readers had to be forum members in order to interact with the bloggers. Since at that time the forums had yet to gain their own entity to be the popular ThailandQA we know now, the interest for our blogs was sparse. Most writers became disillusioned about this and have left. There was a period of time when I was the sole blogger on the site!

Thai-blogs to the rescue
Around that time, Richard got this brilliant idea to get a proper blog engine and run the blogs on a unique site. This became Thai-blogs that you are reading now. I remember, we had a problem with the name. Richard wanted thaiblogs.com at first, but it was (and still is) reserved by a cybersquatter. And then we vacillated whether having a hypenated URL will cause confusion amongst readers in the future… apparently it didn’t. 🙂

Content transplant
So, we had a site, we had a name, we had an enigne. But if it started empty from scratch, we would have lost valuable time waiting for content and readership to build up. Thus all of Richard’s and my previously written material has been painstakingly moved to the this new place. The timestamp has also been tinkered with, in order to make the intial posts appear as if they had been written for this site gradually over time. While that was a good idea back then, now it’s simply impossible to find our very first blog entry. Oh well… 🙂

With time readers and writers started to come. Another important milestone in the history of Thai-blogs was when Richard started to construct the Big Thailand Quiz and Steve helped out with that project. It was through their discussions about devising the questions that got Steve started out here at Thai-blogs, giving another enormous boost to this community. 🙂

Plans for the future
In this ever-changing cyberworld one has to keep up with the latest innovations to maintain a quality content presentation. The improvements to our blogs did’t just stop here. Richard told me about future plans to further improve Thai-blogs, and without dwelling on them much, let me just tell you that they can take the community to exciting new directions! 🙂

I’m glad to see that during these years, Thai-blogs succeeded to preserve its friendly and informative nature, making it an isle of peace in the sea of thai-related sites gone bad. Couldn’t have gone this far without writers giving quality content, and readers giving inspiration to the writers. Here is hope that we’re going to see Thai-blogs doing great for many years coming. Thanks to you all! 🙂

Long-time readers might still remember the time I started posting about my Thai life on Paknamweb back in 2004, even before the existence of this Thai-blogs community. You have been with me through many ups and downs of my life here, so I want to share with you the recent events that will bring about some of the greatest changes in my life. 🙂

European interlude
My girlfriend Cherry and I are about to leave Thailand. Only temporarily though. 😉 Cherry is going to France for a few days, where she will present her research work on an international science conference in Paris. Afterwards, she’ll spend the next six months doing research at a London university, as the final part of her PhD program.

I will use this time to go back to Hungary for a long-overdue family reunion. I haven’t seen them for the last seven years! After the five years in the US at the uni, and now the two years here in Thailand, I really want to see my family again. 🙂

We’ll leave sometime in June. As you can imagine, we’re quite excited, and very busy with preparation. We cleared most obstacles already, but some necessities are yet to be done. This evening we’ll leave Chiang Mai on a Bangkok-bound bus (trains don’t leave CM because of the flood). In Bangkok, we’ll apply for the French and UK visas for Cherry. It took a while to get all the evidence together, and we had it checked with the local consulate to be sure, but you never know… so let’s just keep our fingers crossed! 🙂

I will keep writing to Thai-blogs and Thaiwonders even from Europe. I have more than two years worth of Thailand memories; that should easily last for six months, lol.

Reflections
To move to Thailand was the best decision of my life. I learned much, not only about the wonderful local lifestyle, culture and values, but also about myself. I believe that my life turned out to be better than what I could’ve ever have in the US, had I stayed there for the additional five-six years necessary for the PhD.

The next six months will be a great time to test and contrast the values I adopted here, with the one I left behind such a long time ago. At the same time, I want to come back to Thailand at the end, nice as it may be to be with family. To me, Europe is only a visit to the past. My home, my life, is here now.

Thanks for everyone who kept reading my life stories through these years. 🙂

SiamJai

Hey Oakley,

So nice to see you here! 🙂

It’s the story like this that ruins it for the rest of us Thai girls who do fall in love with our farang husbands for the right reasons.

Exactly. Also, female co-workers and friends are affected with this stigma, just because they hang out with a farang guy. I feel sorry for them, and especially for Cherry that she has to put up with all that BS, totally undeserved. All that just because of these losers!

It just sucks that when you and your husband show up together in Thailand, first thought comes: Ah, a farang and his hooker. Then, oh may be it’s the farang and his young money hungry wife. It never ends as, well they are just another married couple.

So it won’t change after marriage either then. 🙁 But of course, what else to expect, when these jerks disgrace the notion of marriage as well! I wonder, do they ever feel any trace of shame during the ceremony that was built upon all the values that they themselves lack? What a hoax! :-/

Also, kinda amusing that the only ones supporting the “trade” are the ones not affected by it personally. It’s soo easy to be non-judgemental on issues where there is no personal backlash on yourself! Talk about the real ignorant outsiders, lol! 😀

A high Google rating is a highly-coveted prize on the Net. However, popularity can be a bad thing, and this folk wisdom seems to apply to the cyberworld as well.

Let’s play a Google game! Have you ever wondered what you’ll get if you type homeless farang
into the search window? Try it. 🙂

Let’s get a bit more naughty. Type this: what does intercours look like and marvel at the results. 😉

I got these and other keywords from the blogstats for this site.

gay barber shampoo -bill
hairy armpit girls photos
thailand exhibitionist meeting points -siamjai
what does intercours look like -richard
unseen siam media
alcoholism in thailand
sweet thais girls -steve
make love thai girl -steve
thai and laos teenager dating line -oakley