I'm still in Chiang Mai. But for a change I had something useful to do: My old company asked me to do a small piece about the birldflu - so I earned some money today. And in 20 minutes I'll have a date.

Talk about being at the right place at the right time: Apparently the people back home are pretty much freaking out about the bird flu whereas people here are comparatively cool about the whole thing. At first we wanted to do a telephone interview. But unfortunately the quality of the telephone lines here is so lousy that we dropped the idea. Instead Gabriele mailed me her questions, I spoke the answers into me MP3-recorder and mailed them to her.

Maybe a bit complicated - but it worked. The soundquality was a bit of a problem since I simply couldn't find a quite place to record anything. In my room you have traffic noise even when the windows are closed. So I even tried to record everything sitting in the wardrobe. But in there you had some sort of hollow accoustics that just didn't work. And of course, just when I had convinced myself that the streetnoise was giving the take more autheticity, the cleaners started to clean the rooms around me, banging doors, switching on a stereo and singing loudly. So I picked up my visa for Laos first. Wel, in the end things did work out and I earned money. So I'm happy.

Yesterday I went to a nice bar called "THC" (yeah, right) around the corner where they have a pretty big roof patio. It's a pretty social place and so it wasn't long before I started speaking with people. One of the was from Belfast and I was just so happy to be able to speak with someone from the North again. And *bang* my Belfast accent was in full bloom again after two seconds. The girl I'm about to meet is from the States, Tiffany, early twenties, studies Thai at the university in Chiang Mai. Actually I don't know whether I really can call it a proper date. But we agreed yesterday to meet for dinner today, so I'm gonna treat it as one. I even put on my Issey Miyake.