ELECTRONICS!

For those of you in the know, Circuit City is now on the list of establishments that get the butt smear. You see, shortly before we left for Thailand, we bought a camera and an extra memory card. Before paying, we asked the sales rep that helped us whether or not the card and the camera were compatible and she assured us they were. However, yesterday when we tried to put the card in for the first time we had a rude surprise. The card and the camera do not work together as the card is too big to fit in the slot where it is supposed to. We’re certain that anyone can understand our frustration considering we can’t just pop over to Circuit City and explain the conundrum.

So it was that we headed out today to go to Panthip Plaza, an electronics bazaar as we were told. Once again, we walked over to the train, which we’ve done just about every day. We feel very local, if one can feel so. Anyway, we took our time finding the place, but when we did, we were not at all oversold. The place is absolutely ridiculous. It is at least 5 stories tall and crammed with electronics. If the Terminator were to need a new limb or an eye, I think he could find it at Panthip Plaza. If the Transformers were looking for relatives, they would start here. It was a visual overload.

We shopped around as we were instructed to do and ended up saving roughly 300 baht, which may only be $10 but sounds like a whole hell of a lot more, okay. We are back on track and everything is a go. We also couldn’t avoid buying a couple DVDs. They have just about any recent movie you could want, including the newest Harry Potter and “Die Hard: Live Free or Die Hard”. We didn’t buy either. The best part of buying them was hearing the person at the counter ask us to come back in 15 minutes after she’d burned our copies. Got to love the black market. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that they’re not camcorder jobs, or that if they are, the camera man wasn’t sitting in the front row. (Let’s hope Jerry was working the camera.) While we waited, Hilary got some sesame balls. It turned out that they seemed to be filled with sweetened plantains. They tasted strikingly similar to sesame snacks, but soft and warm instead of cold and crisp.

That was about it for our day. We’re ready to get out of the city now.

Something I forgot to include yesterday was that we stopped by the Peace Corps office and the place is about 10 times bigger than the office in Fiji, which is in no way an exaggeration. It is 3 or 4 floors tall and has a separate building for the medical office and volunteer lounge, which is embarrassingly better in every way than the one in Fiji. Volunteers here have access to internet, cable TV, numerous DVDs and VHSs, a refrigerator, a large catalog of work materials and a respectable library of books actually worth reading, for the most part. They also have 24 hour access to the lounge. Oghale, we hope you read this and think about the possibility. (The improvement of the volunteer lounge was one of my last projects before I finished work on the Volunteer Advisory Committee and my PC service, but it never happened.)