Chaweng beach just outside my hotel, looking south

Usually when I travel abroad, I write a few emails about what’s happening during the trip and send them to friends and family as Travel Reports (“Reserapporter” in Swedish). This time I decided to use my blog instead. That way I can just email the URL once to those I normally send the reports to and tell them to subscribe to the blog if they want get future travel updates Just this once (since I mentioned it) I’ll add the subscription token here in the post (otherwise you find in the Meta section to the right):

Sacrifices

As a creature of habit, I find myself in Thailand once again. I have lost count on how many times I’ve been here since the late 90’s (some years two or three times), but why go somewhere else when you’ve found the perfect spot? I even stay at the same hotel most of the times, so it’s almost like a home away from home to me.

What? No fun in coach?

This trip is slightly different though. I’m traveling with my old buddy Masse this time (I usually go alone), and since he is as poor as a church mouse, I’ve had to make some sacrifices. It’s been years since I got fed up with travelling coach, so now I only fly Premium or Business Class. It’s expensive, but when you spend 11+12 hours (it’s always an hour more on the way back since we’re flying against the trade winds then) on the plane, it’s worth it if you can afford it. Now I had to ride coach though :O Well, I didn’t strictly speaking have to, but I wanted to sit with Masse. It was alright though since we flew with a brand new Boeing Dreamliner which is rather comfortable even in coach.

At our destination, Koh Samui, I always stay at Aloha Resort on Lamai Beach. I chose Lamai over Chaweng Beach since the latter is too crowded for my taste. Masse is more of an action man than me though, so this time I’m on Chaweng.

Linköping to Chaweng Beach

We took the bus from Linköping to Stockholm, and then Arlanda Express to Arlanda airport. The bus was a good choice since the trains were delayed (as they so often are).

A Norwegian-787-8 from the outside…

We flew with Norwegian from Arlanda to Bangkok. The plane was a new Boeing Dreamliner (a 787-8 to be precise). You may have noticed that there have been, and still are, lots of problems with the Dreamliners. We got lucky though. The day before we left I checked all Norwegian flights with the 787 for the last couple of days, and they were all delayed. The flight with the least delay lifted one hour after plan!

Our flight was actually right on schedule, and boarded in time. The take-off was still delayed for half an hour though (but not due to any problems with the aircraft). We were supposed to fly over Ukraine, but after that Malaysian passenger flight was shot down there by pro-Russian “rebels” a week ago, no airlines fly there. So we were to take a detour farther south, but since all flights did that, in addition to all the flights that go that way normally, we had to wait for a slot. So at least the wait was for a good cause

…and inside

The flight lasted eleven hours. Masse dosed off a couple of times, but I wasn’t tired at all and stayed awake the whole time.

Flying economy class with Norwegian means that absolutely nothing is included except for the seat. You have to use a credit card to pay with if you want food, water, drinks, a blanket, headphones, and anything else you might need. But at least they have made it easy to order and pay. You just select the “shop” from the touchscreen in front of your nose, pick out what you want, swipe your credit card in the slot, and within moments a flight attendant comes along with your stuff.

At least you didn’t have to pay for the entertainment system (apart from the headphones if you don’t have your own with you – I had, but not Masse). I played some games, listened to music, and watched two movies. Well, one and a half. I started to watch Gravity, but that movie doesn’t really work on such a small screen, but I think I made it halfway through it anyway (I’ve seen it before). The Hobbit II (The Desolation of Smaug) that I watched next is of course also made for a big screen, but at least it has some actual contents (as compared to Gravity), so the visuals isn’t everything

We landed in Bangkok about 35 minutes late at 7:30 am, so I had 90 minutes before my Bangkok Airways flight to Koh Samui took off (Masse stayed in Bangkok for a couple of nights). I had already checked in over Internet, and I don’t have any baggage to check, so all I needed to do was to show up at the gate 40 minutes before boarding. Easy, right? Nope. After getting off the plane I had to walk a kilometer or so to the main building, wait in line at Immigration, get through Customs, and climb the escalator to Departures on the 4th floor. When I made it there I realized that my phone wouldn’t connect to any network (roaming didn’t work), so I couldn’t get at the email with my electronic boarding card.

Great! What to do now? The lines at the check-in counters were huge, and by the looks of the passengers waiting there, I would have been lynched if I had tried to cut in. The check-in machines (correctly) noted that I had already checked in and refused to let me do it again. I remembered that I had my old Thai SIM card in the wallet and tried to use it, but it was dead (probably disconnected since I hadn’t used it for so long).

By now I had already given up, but I started to look for a TrueMove (the operator that I prefer to use in Thailand) booth to get a new SIM card), and for a while I could still have made it in time, but it took me too long to find it. To ask for directions never hit me as an option – remember that I was stressed out and hadn’t slept for a long time…

Anyway, I bought a new TrueMove-H “3G Tourist Inter SIM” package with 30 days (cheaper than 2*7 days) Internet over 3G (up to 6 GB data). It works great, and TrueMove also have WiFi hot-spots everywhere, and they are free when you have that package.

Didn’t help me at the time though. So I went to Bangkok Airways ticket office at the 6th floor, fully expecting to have to buy a new ticket, but resigned to accept that in the hope of at least finding a new flight on the same day. I told my story (in short-form) to the lady behind the counter, and she simply re-booked me on the next available flight – at no extra cost?! Unfortunately, that flight wasn’t until 5:45 pm, but she also put me on the standby list and told me to check at the check-in counter every hour. I got really lucky and was one of three standby passengers to get on the next flight at 10:20, only 80 minutes later than planned

The flight was delayed 30 minutes, and it was a smaller, slower propeller plane, but I landed on Koh Samui around noon without further problems. The hotel was then just a ten minute taxi ride away.

Accommodations

Looking north up the beach road from just outside the hotel…

I had found a really nice bungalow village by the beach in the southern, less crowded, part of the beach. The full name of the “hotel” is Tradewinds by LAWANA, but here it’s known as just Tradewinds. I have a “garden view” bungalow, but I can still see part of the pool, and beyond it the sea, from my porch.

…and inside the gates looking east down the path to my bungalow and the sea.

I arrived here three days ago on July 25, so I’ve had a couple of days to settle in, and I really like it here. I was a bit worried about the noise at night (I generally go to bed quite early), but here in the garden I hear nothing but the waves of the ocean, and weak base tunes from the nearby bars. And the rain of course – it is after all the rain season, so there is a shower now and then…

Not my bungalow, but they are identical.

The bungalows are quite big, and orange with blue splines and red tile roofs. The porches are also big with stone tile floor and wooden furniture (I don’t like the plastic stuff that is so common down here). I couldn’t get a good picture of my own bungalow since it is surrounded by that green stuff, but there is a picture of the one next to mine somewhere on this page.

There’s no minibar, but a large fridge that I fill with drinks and snacks from the store across the street. And my snus for the trip of course.

Last night I woke up from a scratching sound by the window. It turned out to be two Gecko lizards playing around. I like those little creatures, and they eat mosquitoes and other annoying insects, so I let them be and went back to sleep.

View from the poolside stairs down to the beach where I take my morning bath

Sunrise is at 6:10 am, so I get up at six, sit on the porch until seven when breakfast is served in the beach-side restaurant 15 meters away. After breakfast I go for a swim in the sea, and then it’s back to the porch again.

It’s about an hour to sunset now (happens at 6:43 pm) and the mosquitoes are beginning to get aggressive. There are lots of places for them to breed here in the garden, which I guess is pretty much the only negative thing about staying here instead of at a “real” hotel.

Looking North along Chaweng beach from just outside my hotel

Ok, one final picture from the beach and that’s it for now.

No more of this for me

I am not trying to tell anyone to stop drinking alcohol here. Neither is this a help for anyone trying to quit drinking (at least I don’t think so). I just wanted to write a little about why and how I myself stopped drinking, and how I now look at alcohol (hint: I have nothing at all against it).

I am 47 years old when I write this, and I have been a heavy drinker since my late teens. Most people that I have ever met in my life would probably picture me with a beer bottle in my hand if asked to visualize me right now

Am I an alcoholic? I would say no, but I have come to realize that this depends on how you define the word. The stricter meaning of the word alcoholic (which is the one that I have always used) is someone who is addicted to alcohol. That, I am not and have never been – I just like to drink and I really like beer.

However, you can also use the word alcoholic in a broader sense, where it for example also includes people who are not in control of their drinking for other reasons than addiction. In that sense I would have to call myself an alcoholic. This is not how I use the word, but I wanted to be clear about what I mean.

So, I don’t call myself an alcoholic, but i have been an alcohol abuser for a very long time.

This didn’t use to be a problem for me, but as I have grown older and been burdened with other problems as well (that I may or may not talk about in a later post), I finally realized that my drinking was indeed becoming a serious problem. The most obvious aspect of this was that I drank so much that I couldn’t make it out of bed to go to work the day after. Not just once or twice, but increasingly often. I should perhaps add at this point that I have been open with problems, and my employer know all about it now.

I tried to simply drink less of course, but that didn’t work for me. I would tell myself that this night, I will absolutely not drink more than one or two beers. But after those beers, there was always that feeling of, “Hey, this feels good – how bad would it really be to take just one more?” After that, there was no stopping me. You can call it stupid if you like, I just see the fact of it, and the fact is that couldn’t stop myself once I had started drinking.

“Fine, but if you couldn’t stop drinking once you had started, then why not just stop going out so often?” I tried that too of course. Didn’t work. I just couldn’t stay away from the pub, which was where I always met my friends. That is how we had “always” socialized, and just stopping was not as easy as you might think.

At least I have slightly more hair than Homer…

Anyway, one day last summer I woke up with a massive hangover. The only thing I could remember from the night before was telling a friend that I had an important meeting at work the next morning, so I would just drink one beer and then go home. Right. That meeting had been a couple of hours earlier while I was still sleeping, fully clothed, on top of the bedspreads.

That was that. Now I had to do something, but what? I had tried to stay away from the pub and failed. I had tried to drink less once there and failed with that too. So I ended up talking to a doctor I was seeing for other reasons and asking if he could write me a recipe for Antabus, which he did once I had explained my problems to him.

Antabus pills

Antabus is something that you typically give to more serious abusers, for example to repeat-offenders that commit crimes when drinking. But I thought it might help me to just keep away from drinking altogether for a while so that I could get my act together.

Antabus is a rather clever thing; Alcohol is a poison, but we humans have a natural “immunity” to it through different glands that produce enzymes that helps our bodies to break it down. What Antabus does is to inhibit the production of some of those enzymes. The end result is that your body suddenly realizes that alcohol really is a very dangerous poison, to which your body then reacts violently. If you drink even a very small amount of alcohol while taking Antabus, you will get really, really sick very quick. Feeling dizzy and throwing up is just the start of it. Just knowing about these symptoms was enough for me. No way that I would take even a sip of beer while “on the pill”.

At the same time as I started taking Antabus, I also started seeing a substance-abuse doctor regularly. He actually wasn’t a real doctor, I just say that since I don’t know what else to call him. He had worked with alcoholics and other drug addicts for over 30 years, so he really knew what he was talking about. The Antabus helped me to stay away from the pub the first couple of months, but it was these sessions that really helped me with my drinking. I have learned a lot from this guy. About drinking and more importantly, about myself. His deal was to give me new ways of looking at things and see things for what they really are. Not to tell me to do this and don’t do that. It is difficult to explain this in words, but it really worked.

So that was the why and how of it, but what about now?

The last time I drank alcohol was at a party at my pal Chongen’s. This was 31st of August, 2013, which is more than ten months ago as I write this. I wasn’t really going to attend that party since I was just waiting for the all-clear to begin taking my Antabus pills (which I did the Tuesday after the party), but then I thought that this might be the last time that I ever drank anything, and that I would rather remember the last drink as having a good time, than not remembering what I did, as was the case of the next-to-last time. I had four or five bottles of beer and a really good time at that last drinking party, so that was a success I suppose

Well, that’s not entirely true… I did have two low-alcohol beers (less than 2.25 volume percent), or “lättöl” as we call it in Sweden, at dinner at my work’s summer party a couple of weeks ago. It actually affected me, so no more lättöl for me. Non-alcohol beer (less than 0.5 volume percent) is fine though. They have a really good non-alcohol Staropramen at my favorite pub and restaurant, Mörners, so now I can go there and have a beer (sort-of) with my pals again.

When I stopped drinking, people around me became cautious about drinking in my presence. That is very considerate of them of course, but there is really no need for that (which I try to tell everyone). I might miss the cold beers in the summer, or a warming whiskey on a cold winter night, but I have absolutely no problem in staying off the alcohol even when everyone around me is drinking.

I am not against alcohol at all. If you cannot handle your drinking it (like me), you should probably stop (though I won’t be the one telling you that), but apart from that I consider alcohol to be a part of our culture – embrace it

I might some day decide to have a glass of wine or a beer at dinner, or a whiskey after. That would not be a failure for me (though getting drunk would). Being sober is just a choice I have made, and for the time being it feels absolutely right.

Edit: January 2015. I finally got around to correcting a a couple of bad character conversions in this post from when I moved my site to a new hosting service a couple of months back. Also wanted to add that I have now been sober for 16 months – still no problems

Chaweng beach, Koh Samui, Thailand

Finally, everything is decided and booked for my Thailand vacation. This time I will travel with my friend Masse, but we split up in Bangkok and he will arrive in Koh Samui sometime after me.

We fly with Norwegian from Arlanda airport on Thursday July 24 and arrive in Bangkok early on Friday morning. From there I take a Bangkok Airways flight to Koh Samui, where I stay in a garden-view bungalow at Tradewinds by LAWANA on Chaweng beach. The return trip goes the same way on Sunday August 10, which means that I spend 16 nights in Thailand.

I’ll be back in my flat late Sunday evening and start work again the next morning. From experience I know that this is not very… comfortable, but since I only work 25% I think I can manage it

As usual, I haven’t planned any activities, and I will probably spend most of my time there reading on the porch of the bungalow or somewhere in the shade by the beach. The perfect vacation for me is when I can just relax and do nothing – pretty much what I would do at home except in a warmer climate, with nice views, and with wonderful Thai food.

I travel light this time. No luggage to check in. The most important thing I take with me is my Kindle Paperwhite, loaded with books I used to be skeptical about e-book readers, but I love my Kindle which I have had for about two years now. I have looked at other e-book readers, but none of them comes even close to the Kindle in my opinion. I used to stuff my bag with pocketbooks, but now I just put my Kindle in my pocket instead and have all my books available directly – and buying new ones is ridiculously simple.

As I write this, it’s 22 long days until it’s time to jump on the train to Arlanda airport. Can’t wait…

Don’t forget… what the hell was it again?

…a big fat nothing

As I described in my previous post Living with no memories, I have serious memory problems, and the doctors have performed a “memory investigation” for a couple of months now. Last week I had an appointment with the doctor in charge of the investigation to get the final results: Nothing. Or to be more specific:

• More blood samples than I care to remember tested for all kinds of deficiencies and illnesses. Result: All is well.
• A CT scan of my brain to look for tumors, aneurysms, signs of dementia, etc. Result: All is well.
• An “extended memory and dementia test” performed as an interview with a lot of questions and exercises. Result: All is “within parameters”.

I am of course happy that the CT scan didn’t show anything. Regarding the blood samples I have mixed feelings; On one hand I’m happy to be healthy, but on the other hand, if my memory problems were to have been caused by say a substance deficiency, then it would probably have been rather easy to amend…

I was very surprised to hear the results from the memory test. In my case, “within parameters” means that I scored right on the lower limit of what is considered to be “normal” for a man of my age. Well, if the test says that I am “normal”, then “normal” is not good enough for me.

As I mentioned in the other post, I used to have very good memory, and to go from there to constantly forgetting what I was talking about before I can finish a sentence, and always forgetting why I went there when I get to another room – that is just not acceptable to me.

What happens now is that the doctor has remitted me to the memory clinic at the Linköping University Hospital. I don’t know when they can make time for me, but I’m hoping that they will be able to tell me more about what is wrong with me than this investigation did…

My dead phone was a Samsung Galaxy S3 like this one.

I overslept this morning and woke up annoyed at 07:50. My mobile phone was (supposedly) charging by my bed, and was set to wake me up at 06:00, but the alarm didn’t ring. I soon discovered that the phone was completely dead, and when I think back to when I went to bed, I think that I noticed that I didn’t hear the usual “ok, I’m charging now”-beep when I connected the charger, but I didn’t think about it at the time.

Hoping that the problem was with the charger I tried it with my work phone, but that worked just fine. I then tried to remove and reinsert the battery a couple of times, but no luck.

As I got ready to go to work I realized that I was about to miss my 08:00 appointment at the company health care center, so I picked up my phone to call and tell them that I was going to be late. Darn it! But wait! I can call from my work mobile! Darn it again – I didn’t have the number there. I called another nurse that I know there, but just got her voice mail. So I left a message for her to let “my” nurse know that I was late, but would bee there soon.

When I was about to leave home, I remembered that I had an important 09:00 meeting, and cussed a bit for not hearing the reminder. Oh, right – no mobile… I was still going to make it, but I would have to hurry. So I called the health care center again and left a new message saying that I would come there directly after my first meeting instead.

The meeting went well and after it I jumped up on my bicycle ant went to the health care center. The doors were locked. Darn it yet again!

I went back to my office and sat down at my computer. It took me almost an hour to log in, but that’s another story. When I finally got in I opened my private web-mail (Gmail) to inform my friends that I had no mobile today, but that didn’t work either. I have activated the Google two-step verification which means that when I log in from an “unknown” computer, I have to enter a six-digit code generated by an authorization app in my mobile phone. Yeah, good luck with that!

Ok, fine – I’ll just install that app in my work phone too! Didn’t work. In order to do that I had to perform a step on an ordinary computer, which involves entering an authorization code from the phone where the app is currently installed. But for f*ck’s sake!!!

The new phone I bought today was a Galaxy Note 3 like this one (black)

Since I was only working until noon anyway, I just dropped it. Instead I googled a while to find a new phone. I have had a Samsung Galaxy S3 since they came out, and have been very happy with that choice. So I looked at and compared the S3, S4 and S5, but in the end I decided on a Galaxy Note 3 instead. At 11:15 I clocked out and bicycled back to town, bought my new phone at Teknikmagasinet down town and went home.

I have only inserted the SIM card and battery, and it is currently charging beside me. I don’t know if this matters with newer batteries, but I want to charge it fully before starting it up the first time. I think I have at the most an hour left to wait…

“No memories” is a strong exaggeration of course, but I really do have a serious memory problems. It wasn’t always like that. I actually used to have better memory than most – remembering whole conversations, meetings, etc. nearly word by word. But that was years ago, and as an example of what I mean by “memory problems”; I remember it being like that at some point, but I couldn’t tell you when even if my life depended on it. As in; “How long have you had this problem with your memory?” “I honestly have no idea whatsoever.”

You know when you come in to a room to do something, and can’t remember what it was? When that happens once in a while, you probably just laugh about it. When it happens every time you come in to a room, it’s no fun at all – I can promise you that. Sometimes I stand there for a while and try to remember what I was supposed to do, and then I give up and turn around to go back, only to realize that I have forgotten what I was doing before I got there. And let me tell you – that is scary.

Some things I remember quite well. Other things just disappear as soon as I hear them. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to what I remember and forget. For a while I thought that it was easier to remember stuff that interested me, but if there is, it is probably just because I make more of an effort to remember it.

My father had Alzheimer’s disease, which is really frightening stuff, and also hereditary. So when I noticed that I was starting to forget things, I of course worried that it was the first signs of an early onset of Alzheimer’s. The doctors calmed me down in that aspect though. They told me that Alzheimer’s didn’t begin that way, and that my memory problem was in all likelihood just a symptom of my stressful job. That sounded likely, because I have had continuing problems with that for years.

I’m not so sure about that anymore, though.My problems are too severe for stress to be the only cause. A couple of the doctors have suggested a small brain aneurysm or even a tumor. I don’t know how to feel about that prospect…

Remembering things that I hear or read is not the only problem. I regularly miss appointments and meetings. Reading a book is hard – I need to back up all the time. I find it very difficult to keep focused on anything for more than a couple of minutes. And so on…

A couple of months back, I finally got to talk to a doctor that actually took what I said about my memory seriously. He gave me a ten minute memory and dementia test, and didn’t like what he saw. So he remitted me to the memory clinic at the Linköping University Hospital. They quickly responded that they were swamped with patients and requested that a “memory investigation” of me was first performed to see if they should prioritize my case. This was in early February.

At this point I can almost hear you thinking “Seems to me like he remember these things perfectly”, but unfortunately that is not the case. I have kept a journal since January, and this is me picking tidbits from that. Anyway, I feel like I’m drawing this out too much already, so I’ll try to keep it brief.

My doctor at the district health care center was put in charge of this investigation, which is still ongoing. They started by taking a whole array of blood samples for testing all kinds of stuff that may have relevance to my symptoms, but they didn’t find anything there. I was also put through a more thorough memory and dementia test, but I haven’t heard anything about the results. The same goes for the CT scan that they made of my brain last week. I assume that all results goes to my doctor, who will then put together a report. I have a meeting booked with her on April 9, and I hope that everything is done by then. Kind-of scary, but (almost) anything is better than not knowing.

I’ll try to remember to report back after the meeting