There is a children’s playground right next to my apartment block, it also has a running track, and most morning there are a few people jogging around it, trying to keep fit. At one end of the park is an open storm drain, not very big, not very deep, take a look at this picture below.

You see that white concrete bridge? Well that’s the storm drain underneath it. This is about 100 metres from my house, I took this picture from my balcony. This morning at 6am, a jogger discovered three dead children in the storm drain, supposedly drowned. They were a pair of brothers and a friend, quite young about four or five years old.

Now what the hell are three kids of this age doing out on their own at 6am in the morning? Why didn’t anyone see them? How did all three manage to die? Surely if one fell in the others would shout or go for help? There are shops just across the street, and this is a fairly busy road, the chances of nobody seeing three boys get into this kind of trouble is extremely slim even at 6am.

I think there is something suspicious about all this, it just does not add up to me, I don’t believe it is possible that this could have been an accident.

I am so pissed off with 1and1 this week, on Monday and Tuesday my email was down, and now this morning its down again! I pay these wankers for a hosted Microsoft Exchange account because I need a robust mail solution for work, what’s the freaking point if its down for three days a bloody week?

On a slightly different note, it occurs to me that I meet more loonies here in Surin than I have ever met anywhere else. Let me briefly introduce a few of them.

• Ghost Butterfly Man – This Thai guy frequents the small cafe across the road from my apartment, he only knows two words of English, the word ghost and the word butterfly, and he insists on having a conversation with me based around those two words whenever I see him, gripping stuff!
• Idiot Samlo Man – Another Thai guy, he rides a samlo, which is similar to a rickshaw. He is a complete idiot, he see’s me pulling out of the apartment block on my motorcycle, so he stops to ask me if I need a ride, what the fuck?
• Dance Freak Woman – This Thai woman works in the local food market selling meat, but once a week she turns up in the restaurant across the road from me, dumps a ton of change into the juke box and stands there dancing in the middle of the restaurant for a few hours, really weird.
• Take My Dog Man – He lives in a wooden shack on the land next to my apartment block, every time I see him he tries to give me one of his dogs, horrible ugly things with an entire ecosystem going on under their fur.

This is just a handful of the wacky characters I deal with every day in this town, honestly its fruit cake central around here, so I fit in well!

I’ve begun looking around for a new place to live, mainly because I feel I am being ripped off by the owners of the apartment I am currently staying in. The charge for electricity is 6 Baht per unit, and I know for a fact that they are paying around 4 Baht a unit, so they are basically stealing 2 Baht a unit from me. It’s not going well though, very few decent options here.

Anyway, I’ve been working hard lately, so we are going to take a holiday next month and go back to Koh Phangan and visit some friends. If I haven’t found a decent place to live by the time we are due to leave the island, I might think about moving back there, although I’m not sure Nuth would be pleased about this.

Leon is growing at an alarming rate, and he is turning in to quite a character, above is a picture of him eating his breakfast, and giving me a nasty look because I keep trying to steal one of his eggs.

Something happened today that I found quite disturbing. During the week Nuth stays with her father in their village about 8km away from Surin, he is old and needs somebody to take care of him. This works out really well as it gives me time to work in the week without interruption and we spend the weekends doing fun things.

Today I drove Nuth home to her village, whilst I was helping her move her bags inside and get Leon settled, her neighbours Son turned up drunk. He started an argument with his father, and then killed him right in front of us, seriously just across the street in their garden.

So the police were called and they carted him off. You just don’t expect to see somebody murdered right in front of you!