Being on the road this long lends itself to a certain rhythm. Not every hostel or hotel has a laundry service or some of them charge outrageous per-piece prices I am not willing to pay. Usually there is a full service laundry shop nearby wherein the workers will wash, dry and fold all your laundry until the next day for a per kg price.I used many such shops in the Philippines and in Vietnam. Always very happy with the result and the easy access of them.
In rare cases I will do my laundry in a laundromat myself. Here in Silom I don’t really have any good laundry services nearby and even the closest self-service laundry is 10-minute walk. No problem: just jump on a grab bike or walk the short distance up to Decho Road.
In a small side street in the back houses is a glorious laundromat. The machines are quick and easy to operate with signage being clear and in English. You buy your detergent from a vending machine on the wall for a mere 5THB. You then spend 60THB for the washing cycle and 50THB for the drier. I won’t put some shirts in the drier in risk of shrinking them to doll sizes.
The wash takes 25 minutes. Just enough time to go around the corner and enjoy a nice hot bowl of duck noodles and have a short chat with the duck noodle lady who speaks English very well. Then back to the laundry and change my clothes from the washer to the drier. Another 28 minutes to go I check out the assorted goods of the 7-11 around the corner. After cooling down inside and buying water, vitamin-c drink or to be honest any kind of snack I head back to the laundry a last time. I bundle up all my fresh clothes and head back to my accommodation.
I do this about once a week and usually am done in about 1.5 hours. Not as easy as having a washer and drier in the apartment with me, but I find it to be soothing activity that brings back a bit of structure into this current vagabond life of mine.
Hungry I stumble down the Si Lom Road in search for food. I smell the familiar spices of south Indian cookery. I get lucky next to the Sri Maha Mariamman Temple. A huge Masala Dosa being brought to my temple. Filled with lots of potatoes. I revel in memories of my trip down to Bengaluru a couple of years ago. Sweat running down my back. The heat of the chilis combines with the unrelenting humidity of rainy season.
This area is probably my favorite. Vendors sell prepared food in bento boxes or cups. Come noon workers from the nearby business towers swarm the street. Even then, you’ll find plenty of quiet backstreets. The locals seem relaxed and there is plenty to explore.
Working with the CLI is still one of the main modes of computation for me. My approach to scripts and tools on the command line has changed. Instead of writing complex ‘god’ shell scripts that try to cover all edge cases, I began to write a lot simpler scripts. Yes, they might not work in all situations, but reading and maintaining them is a lot easier for me.
Since working with Go is so comfortable to write, I started to write more and more CLI tools in it. I collect those tools in my belt repository on codeberg
.
I appreciate a lot of what Golang is doing, and some CLI tools are just thin CLI’s around a Go function. But Go is great for some more complex tools. Charm
makes excellent libraries that I often use. Cobra
is very useful when a tool grows to have more rich CLI options.
When writing a Go tool I still practice the approach that less code is better. I start with just a main.go and as the tool evolves I slowly refactor it into Cobra cmds or different files.
I also make extensive use of code agents to write and rewrite. Nonetheless, I like to think there is still a human touch in these tools. If anything, this is a great way to learn and improve.
I usually try my idea for a new tool and put it in my labs repo on codeberg
. It then might graduate to belt if I use it for a while, and I get the impression of it being kind of well-rounded.
I can only recommend anyone to also create their own set of tools like this. It feels great to be able to add features when needed and there is a subjective boost to my capacity not only on the terminal but to my computing in general.
I love taking pictures. I got some kind of Casio EXILIM EX around 2005 that I used extensively. Eventually I decided that I wanted a DSLR. Finally, in 2007 while visiting the US I had the opportunity to buy a Canon 400D with the kit lens from a small camera shop in Maryland for a reasonable price. I loved that camera so much. Only much later in 2018 I sold my Canon 400D and upgraded to a Canon 450D for the Live View mode. In recent times I tinkered with toy thermal print cameras and I enjoyed the dithered images and the immediacy of the prints.
I started my big trip in January this year. And by the time of writing it is now July. I wanted to feel as free as possible and wanted to travel with minimal luggage. One bag should be enough. I also didn’t want to bother syncing images every evening. I didn’t want to haul around a huge Camera. In fall of 2024 I sold my remaining Lenses and the 450D.
I’d gotten an iPhone 15 in 2023, and I found the camera to be quite ok. It is an expensive device so it ought to be expected, I guess? The years before I had used cheaper Motorola Moto G phones mostly. The cameras were not great but serviceable. Beside the whole vendor lock in: iOS has some things that I really don’t like and will probably exit the iPhone ecosystem once again when my current phone dies. But the pictures it takes are quite ok. Ok enough to be my main camera.
How is traveling with just a smartphone as your camera? Well, it is a lot more ‘point-and-shoot’. But between navigating foreign cities and trying to organize my travel I found it to be liberating. I see more and more people (young western tourists) with analog gear and disposable film cameras. I think it’s funny that while I am loving the freedom this multi-use rectangle in my pocket gives me other people have been going back to deconstructing and defuturing the smartphone device. Like the rise of dumbphones in recent years. We live in a time of parallel trends. Of streams that go into all kinds of directions at once. Some of it might be driven by nostalgia, but mostly it is driven by the choices we have.
Of course, there were moments that I wished for more control over my photography. But just taking my phone on this trip instead of a bulky camera gave me so much freedom and less to worry about. Sorting through and deleting pics directly my phone, on a train, on a plane, on a bus (if I don’t get motion sick, that is). Sharing a quick picture to friends and family through Signal. I still do some image ‘developing’ in darktable before posting them on the blog. Not only to remove the EXIF data but also to creatively work with the picture.
I still love photography and digital photography in particular. I am not done with dedicated picture taking devices. There might be a future where I go back to having a bigger camera. Especially full frame has been calling me for some time.
Only a five-minute walk through the blistering midday heat is a very interesting store that always garners quite a large line. I also decided to watch for a little while. But in the end didn’t want to wait 30 to 60 minutes in the scorching heat for a bowl of this soup. It is famous because it allegedly is the same continuous soup for 50 years. It is Sunday and the foreigner crowd here seems even bigger today. I might try them one day. But not today.
I finally wander off to a nearby mall to eat a some eternal noodles in a blissfully airconditioned room. Why they were called eternal was not revealed to me but they were darker than other noodles I had here so maybe these were made with whole grain? In any case, dining here was a great idea not only for my sensitive skin but also because the ancient noodles were delicious. The large number of locals confirmed my suspicion that this restaurant was not only cheap but also well regarded.
I feel the humidity rising while I walk home. Was that a drop?
While I sit on the balcony of my apartment I suddenly hear the sound of wind blowing very strong through the palms and the scaffolding of the nearby construction site. It begins to pour like I have never seen before. Best to get inside.
After all that hard work of eating, reading and watching YouTube I finally can do something I was looking forward to all weekend: my taxes. Thanks to Elster I am able to do these from Thailand no problem. I finally press submit on the tax form. No 10 seconds later the electricity stops working. A black-out. Well then, back to my book.
This area is probably my favorite. Vendors sell prepared food in bento boxes or cups. Come noon workers from the nearby business towers swarm the street. Even then, you’ll find plenty of quiet backstreets. The locals seem relaxed and there is plenty to explore.
