Owen Jones
Naan – The Mountain Kingdom
We set off for Naan – the mountain kingdom before five a.m. and arrived in immigration at eight forty. We were seen immediately and finished fifteen minutes later. By shortly after nine, we were wasting the time we had saved shopping in Tesco Lotus. I bought a mouse, since mine stopped registering clicks a few days ago, and a cover for my Kindle Fire.
The mouse was £1.80 and the cover £9. I am happy with the mouse, but the cover is no better than a plastic bag. Worse, in fact, since it won’t close with the device inside it. It is the worst thing I have ever bought in Thailand.
Still, there’s nothing I can do about it now as we are already on our way home.
We stopped for a meal and in two markets: one for farmers’ produce and one specializing in timber products from teak, which is the emblem of the province of Uttaradit, the one next to Phrae, where the market is.
We actually had to traverse Uttaradit and Phrae to get to Naan for my visa. It’s only about 150 miles, like Cardiff to London, but you couldn’t do it in two hours, because it’s almost straight up in the air.
We arrived home at two p.m, which is the best time by four hours. It has been a good day, and I don’t have to worry about my visa for another eleven months.
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On another note, the Amazon saga concerning European VAT, there was an email awaiting me on arrival. It was someone from Amazon asking me to state my case, so, I emailed him the relevant sales data on a spreadsheet and am waiting for his analysis of it.
As I told him, I hope he is right and that I am mistaken, but I can’t see how else my revenue from a book in the UK is 20% lower than its U.S. counterpart.
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After a few hours’ nap, we went back to our friends’ house for a drink – the parents of the couple who drove us up to Naan – the mountain kingdom – her parents anyway. The have a farm near the Wat (Buddhist Temple) and have allowed a couple of fields next to their house to flood for fishing purposes. I find it a tremendously relaxing place to be. There is music streaming from the Temple now, because today is the Friday they call ‘Good’. Not ‘Good Friday’, just ‘Good’ – isn’t it strange how religions overlap?
And Buddhism is 543 years older than Christianity, or perhaps it isn’t so strange, since most of us believe in one God, it has to be the same entity.
This is a copy of a Tweet I sent out today:
Copy a free plug-in to your #Blogger, #WordPress, Tumblr, phpBB, Typepad or vBulletin account to #monetise it http://smarturl.it/vlinks?IQid=mps #money
Regards,
Podcast: ‘Naan – The Mountain Kingdom’
