S E Asia Travels 2014 continued

DAY 7

Tuesday 24^th June 2014.

It was an 'at home' morning with  my youngest granddaughter's  school friend  coming to play. She lives with her parents in a village about an hour away in a rice growing rural area. The two girls were both pretty excited to be together as it was the first time that they had been able to get together like this. When her mother came to collect her I had a chance to chat to her about the work she is involved in. She is part of an organization which focuses on bringing safe water systems to the rural villages. This includes rain water collection and filtering. They also have a concrete toilet unit with septic tank. All of this is tied in with hygiene education. It all sounded very worthwhile.

During the afternoon my daughter  her daughters, Pippa and I drove to the Hope International Christian School, to choose some books from the Primary school library. I was interested to see how much the junior school has expanded since I was last here two years ago.

We then drove a kilomtre of two to the Savvana Shopping Centre. First was to recharge the data part of my SMART sim card. They have a scheme that you purchase a pre-pay $2 top up and then phone in to SMART Exchange to convert it into $30 data credit. An amazing idea which Becky and Phil use all the time – and why not. Unfortunately, after the assistants had tried all sorts of ways to get my phone done like this, they realised that I had a traveller's promotion SIM and SMART Exchange would not work. So I paid and extra $1 and got a traveller's 1GB of data. I do not plan to upload any other videos to You Tube before we head off to Vietnam on Sunday. So 1 GB should be enough. I am using my phone as a wifi hot spot to link my laptop into.

Meanwhile, my daughter and the girls headed up to the third floor to the ceramic painting centre. The girls each bought a shape which they then painted at the work benches. They certainly enjoyed the activity and ended up with a couple of results they were especially proud of. 

Then it was off to the Apple service centre to see if they could replace the shattered screen of a iPad. Seems the answer is no, but they can sell a replacement at a reduced price. We just need to work out how to back up the files to somewhere safe, when your Apple cloud storage is full. Now that's going to occupy us for a few hours tonight.

At Savanna, I checked out the DVD store but it was so congested that I decided not to bother hunting anything out. I have bought quite a number of disks here on previous visits. After visiting the new Aeon Mall on Saturday, this older shopping centre certainly looked a little tired. We did drop into the Lucky Supermarket on the ground floor where I discovered a bottle of French red wine labled Cuvee Laurence. Of course I just had to buy this to try out during the week. 

There was the usual mid to late afternoon rainfall with some wind. Temperatures seem to be a little lower today and conditions are much more bearable.

Finally spotted one of the ghekos which live around the outside of the house. But this one was in Toby's room and looked like it came through a small corner gap. It was about 300 mm long and a pale pastle green. During the night these creatures make loud calling noises. On my first night here I thought that the sound must have been some weird clock chiming the hours; until I tried to count the chimes and found more than 12 in a row. They are surprisingly loud for such a small creature.

Across the lane is the home and workshop of an undertaker. This morning a tuk tuk arrived with planking for coffins stacked up on it. The undertaker has a funeral tuk tuk parked out front. It has a construction like an enclosed garden shed built on it. Highly colourful with decorations of a Buddhist style all around it.

Put a new video up on You Tube. During the process my phone hotspot ran out of data credit with only 86% of the up loading completed. A few hours later when I returned with a recharged phone the up load continued without any difficulties. Something new learned. This morning my You Tube views total clocked in at 8,754.