Thailand electricity...

I'm sitting here in the dark typing this! Thai electricity is not really world class, to put it mildly. Often when you're walking in the streets of any city in Thailand you will hear the crackling and fizzing sounds of electricity going through the transformers, and even see pretty sparks at night time. Our village has a lot of houses that are out near rice fields so to get power they just buy really really long cables, find a lot of long sticks or tree branches, stick them in the mud every 20 metres and hook it up to the main power, sometimes hundreds of metres away, and bob's your uncle, power! Click on image for clearer view of typical power supply when you don't live near a main road!

We're lucky in that we do live on a main road (apart from the noise!). We have normal power lines that don't talk and don't sparkle and are tightly fixed to stout power polls (mostly!). But tonight we are experiencing some full on techno bliss light show... all our fluorescent lights keep flashing on and off every couple of minutes. The tv and computer stay on but it's a funky ass disco night otherwise! It must look quite amusing to the neighbours! I do believe it's time to get some rewiring done considering they still have the original wiring when electricity first came to the village 25 years ago. I find it quite astounding that J didn't have electricity in the house til he was about 10. He tells me that in town had it significantly longer then that, but the villages didn't get electricity til much later. As a kid he used candles to read and obviously did well without computer games! oooh can't keep going, getting a headache from no lights and bright screen!