Tavipop: The Musical

Takolkiat Veravan, or "Boy," is a well-known talented director/producer in Thailand television industry. And for a couple of times he has been making these fabulous musical plays. (I liked "Ban Lang Mek" so much.) This year it's Tavipop (ทวิภพ), a story about a girl in present time who can travel back in time through a mirror.



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I wasn't aware of this play until my mother gave me 2 complimentary tickets a few days ago for Sunday night's play. Actually, that round was kind of a charity round organized by Satit Chula's alumni association to donate some money to the Thai Red Cross to help tsunami victims. (Takolkiat is a Satit Chula alumnus. // Oh and those seats I've got were really great seats, right in the middle of the hall.) Met many of my high school teachers. It always amazes me that our teachers from the old days remember who we are, no matter how long time has passed.

However, it was only okay. I don't like the leading actor, Captain-Bhutanes, cause his voice wasn't really good (6/10 IMO). Pat-Suthasinee was good. I liked her. Supporting actors are great--though Viyada sings not as good as she should. My guess is if it were Kob-Songsit and Panatda, the play would be much better. Overall: 7.5/10.

Just got back from my office signing the contract. I'm now officially an employee at Thai Airways. There will be more classes, both ground school and simulator classes, coming during the next, uh, 8 months. Classes start tomorrow.

Man, last night I had too many drinks and now I'm like a walking corpse. Actually I'm supposed to join Jade, my high school friend, at Bueng Ta Ko (บึงตะโก้) today for cable ski practice. But I suffer from hangover too much to get off my bed. :-(

This morning when I was driving home from the party I stopped at red light and, after a while, I went asleep. I was waken up again a few minutes later by a traffic policeman who kindly told me to wake up and that 2 green lights had passed. So embarrassing.

Greetings from my new phone

Hutch offered a special price for a new phone. Considering my phone was already 2 years old and it started to have problems, I took the offer. This blog was sent through this new phone. I was at the Hard Rock Cafe in Siam Square.

Hi, long time no see! :-)

After a few changes in the schedule--from Friday morning to Thursday morning to Thursday afternoon--the graduation ceremony finally took place on Thursday afternoon at Hua Hin Airport. The ceremony went fine except it's preety hot because the air condition was out of service. My family couldn't be there but that's fine with me. (FYI, people look at this grauation ceremony as a higher degree graduation, which means it's taken pretty seriously, maybe even more than bachelor degree, university graduation. Almost all families were there.)

There was a graduation party later that night at Hua Hin Grand Hotel. For the past 2 weeks I'd been preparing some videos for the party. (That'd explain why I havn't update this blog.) It went well too, despite that we had less than one week to prepare. (Lazy us!) Later on we decided to go to the brew house at the Hilton. We had some fun, really, eventhough it was a little expensive. Hehe That night was our last night in Hua Hin because we had to leave our dorm by Friday afternoon.

I'll post the pictures later.

I just called True, my ISP, to get my bandwidth upgraded since I'll be moving in to Bangkok in the next 2 weeks. I was looking for 1Mbps downstream/512k upstream. But unfortunately the customer service guy told me that since I have a yearly subscription which ends in November, I can't change my bandwidth till then. That's how Thais do business. Larger bandwidth means more money to the company. They just think it's too hard to calculate excess charge for the remaining yearly subscription. I'll just stick to 256k connection for the next 6 months la kan. *sigh*

The past week I drove further to the south and spent a few days in Koh Samui. It's the 3rd largest island in Thailand and it's so big that you can have your vehicle carried to the island. It's only about 500km from Hua Hin which only took about 5 and a half hours. I left Hua Hin on Tuesday morning, stopped at Chumpon for lunch (and got lost a bit). By the time I got to my hotel it's almost 9pm!


Sunset. Taken while in the ferry to Samui at about 6pm.

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Jon actually got here with his university friends a week before. He recommended this Blues pub called Coco Blues, not very far from the hotel. Not wasting the time, I went there right away. They have farang, or foreigner, musicians playing. And they did a great job actually. Good atmosphere although there's no air condition and it's very hot in there. Reasonable price. Not to my surprise, the owner wasn't Thai.

I have to admit traveling alone is a bit lonely. After a while I decided to head back to bed and take some rest.


Chaweng Beach, Samui. Taken from my hotel's restaurant (Chaweng Gardens Beach Resort).

A few days at Samui were spent on laying down at the beach sleeping (mostly), reading, swimming, and of course parties at night. Cost of living here is very high even compared to Hua Hin. A dish of Thai popular "ka-prao-kai" could go up to 85 baht in ordinary restaurant! But apart from that, everything's great. Luktan, P'Boat, P'Bow, and 4 of their friends joined me on Wednesday till Saturday. (They took Bangkok Airways flight from Bangkok.)

I left the island late on Saturday. At first I thought I'd drive straight to Bangkok but due to a lot of alcohol comsumed the night before, I could only make it to Hua Hin. Got home on Sunday. It's like going back to the real world. Some paperworks for license application and graduation party preparation is waiting. Hrr....

Check out a few more pictures, click here.

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Just bought this Doobadoo album. It features mainly Swing music. In fact, this is the first of its kind ever done in Thailand. Pijika (Lukwa ÅÙ¡ËÇéÒ) did the vocal, including vocal design while Jessada (O âÍë) arranged and produced. They graduated from Chulalongkorn University and had joined the CU Band. They did a great job and are very talented, IMO. If you're bored with the mass-market Thai pop band, this is your alternative. Totally recommended.

By the way, Kru O was my art teacher when I was in 9th grade. (He was practicing teaching in his senior year. Kru Porsche (Moderndog) was practicing too.) Later he had album with an underground band--Sepia.

After having bought a new harddisk earlier this morning, a few hours of re-installing applications, and trying to recover files from the old disk, finally I've been able to retrieve some of the files. However I lost all my personal settings and documents (everything in C:\Documents and Settings). T_T

Last night there was a small party at Jo's house. There were only a few people but it was a real fun. We talked and laughed about everything. Having these guys as friends is a privilege to me, really.

Oh and today is a birthday of my sis, happy birthday ja, Nong Nurse.

My desktop's hard drive has just crashed! I only wish I could recover the data (all the work and documents/pictures).