Category: Asia

As a previous post explained, four years after the death of my wife Judy from cancer, I remarried. When you marry a Thai woman, as I did, you also marry her whole extended family. It is not uncommon for farang (foreigners) to not know this, and it leads to many eventual divorces. I had spent enough time in Thailand to understand this, and took it into account before proposing. The Thai people and culture have much appeal, and I decided to make the big cultural leap.

As part of our premarital negotiations, we agreed to spend 6 months or more a year in the USA, and 4 to 5 months with my wife’s family in northeastern Thailand, with the rest in international travel. Covid disrupted the latter, and that continues to be on hold pending a normalization in travel risk.

Thailand is quite a bit warmer than the Pacific Northwestern USA, so we have come up with a nice seasonal accommodation: we spend April through October in Washington State, which is (usually) a nice weather time, and November through March in Thailand. This is the (usually) cool season there (cool meaning as low as 60°F at night, highs in the low 80s), with little rain. Things are starting to heat up in March, and April is generally the hottest month in Thailand, reaching temperatures over 100°F

Our first ‘winter’ in Thailand, we built a 2200 SF home adjacent to my wife’s mother’s house where she grew up, in our village of about 600 families set in the rice fields of Isaan, Surin Province

Two years ago, I met a beautiful woman in my travels abroad. I had not planned on marrying again, and was not dating anyone, anywhere. She changed my mind about that.

After a wait of nearly a year to get USA permission, she accompanied me to the USA, and on June 15, 2019 we were married at our family farm in Amboy, Washington.

We are now embarking on a new part of our lives.

In the Spring of 2019, Pin and I began her journey to the United States (to marry me) by touring Vietnam from south to north (after our Singapore February visit).

Singapore has long been one of my favorite cities. Clean, lush and green, with lots of good Asian food, parks, ample buses and subways. I think it perhaps the best run large city in the world. I never tire of visiting Singapore.

Judy and I would often make ‘mileage runs’ from San Francisco to Singapore, and stay on Orchard Road within walking distance of the marvelous Singapore Botanic Garden.

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The National Orchid Garden is spectacular.

The Singapore Zoo is delightful. In a natural rain forest jungle setting are spacious open plan exhibits that give the zoo creatures good habitats without walls.

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Continuing to explore Thailand, we headed west from Bangkok to the Kanchanaburi area, home to several big national parks.

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We went to visit a major tourist attraction, famous because of the book and movie of that name. We learned that the book and movie are 90% inaccurate, a fantasy, but that there was a major historical event there, the building of the Thailand-Burma railroad by occupying Japanese forces using slave labor and prisoners of war.

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The movie made it look like the Japanese were incompetent builders (they were not) and that the British superior organization saved the bridge project (they did not). The bridge in the movie is not the one shown, nor was the bridge blown up by commandos and a train wrecked. Nor was the bridge actually over the River Kwai. Otherwise, a movie worth watching. The suffering of the workers was real.