We made it back to Yangon! On January 7th, Gav and I (and the rest of the people who had been living in Thailand) flew to Kuala Lumpur to meet the rest of the returning faculty for a charter flight back to Yangon. The logistics of this were a bit complicated as Malaysia has quite a complicated process (not unlike the Sandbox program that we entered Thailand on) to enter and stay, which obviously we were not doing. However, since the flight we had OUT of KL was a charter flight rather than a regularly scheduled commercial flight, it was not viewable to ground staff who would be checking us in at our point of origin.
Continue reading “Home at last!”Filling time
After Lindsey’s flurry of posts – nothing. My bad. We’ve been moving around a fair bit over the last few weeks and haven’t really been in much of a routine – still no excuse! Where were we? Oh yes, Lindsey with Covid and a swim up room. All very odd.
Continue reading “Filling time”Incarcerated!
Regular readers of this blog are probably thinking “wow, that’s a lot of blog posts coming at us in a short amount of time!” Well, it just so happens that I (Lindsey) have quite a lot of time on my hands at the moment. Let me take you back to last Saturday evening when the mayhem began…
Continue reading “Incarcerated!”Treehouse Escape
Two days after Simon and Paula left we had another 3 day break from school. It seems like we are constantly having holidays, I know. The SE Asian calendar is kind of jammed with important holidays in the latter part of the year . Don’t worry, we pay for it when we have basically no break from January to late April and are just stewing in our own sweat in Yangon.
Continue reading “Treehouse Escape”Surprise!
Well, it’s been a busy and eventful few weeks. It’s going to take a few blog posts to catch up… When we last left off Gav and I had just been on an unsuccessful trip to Bangkok to try to get our visas for Myanmar. While we were there, I exchanged a few (hundred) texts with Gav’s brother and sister in law, Simon and Paula.
Continue reading “Surprise!”Back to Bangkok
Our October break ended on Sunday, October 24th. We were slated to fly back to Yangon on that day on an NGO flight from Kuala Lumpur. This particular NGO has been running flights bringing in humanitarian aid I think, since the beginning of the pandemic. It is possible to come in on that flight but you need special permission. However, even before that we needed to get our visas renewed and this has been going on for some time.
Continue reading “Back to Bangkok”Under the sea
Our school was on holiday this past week so we had no work, yay! In non-Covid times we would try to fly somewhere fun for the time off, but obviously that’s not happening, plus we happen to be in a pretty popular vacation spot so we decided to stay put and do a few things we had been meaning to do around Phuket.
Continue reading “Under the sea”The wild (and not so wild) life of Phuket
The lack of tourists resulting from Covid is bad for the local economy but frankly a relief for us as there are fewer people about. Our villas is surrounded by 10 or 12 other villas but as far as we can tell ours is the only one occupied. I keep thinking a Russian Stag party is going to move in next door but so far we have been spared. I’m not sure whether it’s because of the fewer number of people or whether it’s always like this but an unexpected bonus to Phuket for me is the local wildlife and particularly the birds.
Continue reading “The wild (and not so wild) life of Phuket”Island Life
We’ve been here in Thailand for a month now and have settled into our more permanent accommodation. Way back in August when this whole adventure kicked off, I was under the impression that in order to get our Thai visas we had to let the government know where we would be staying the whole time. I am now not sure that you actually have to do that but anyway it kicked off a mad search to see if we could find someplace that would rent to us for more than a month but less than a year. Airbnb seemed to have lots of medium-term rentals that looked good so we put together a short list from what we could see and eventually picked one house that looked great. It had zero reviews, but that was true of most places on there-I think the pandemic changed how people were renting properties here and new management companies snapped up places and started listing them on that platform.
Continue reading “Island Life”Time with Dad
Lindsey has done a great job with her last post getting caught up with everything that has been going on since we last posted anything. One part she has left for me to write about is the time when I was in the UK and Lindsey was in the States. I returned to London on April 10th and unlike Lindsey had to quarantine for 10 days. Although the UK made you jump through a number of hoops including 3 Covid tests I was allowed to quarantine with a family member which meant I could stay with my Dad.
Continue reading “Time with Dad”