Rush Hour in Bangkok and Jet Lag at the Shopping Mall

Traffic...don't we all just love the long waits, the endless queues and the road rage. Yes Bangkok perhaps has the worst of at least the first two things on that list. Thankfully there is a lot of lane discipline. BJ was however telling me that 2 years ago the lane sense was far better, however the increase in the number of cars has often led to people jumping lanes. If you wanna bypass a lot of the traffic you can use the Sky Train or the MRT (the Bangkok Metro). Both get you from one place to another much faster than the roads and taxis. The network of public rail transport is however still being extended so you may find the service rather limited.

There is something really interesting that I learnt about Thailand today. I was checking the end of the warranty period of something I was gonna buy at a shopping mall and I noticed that the end of warranty was 2549. I was about to comment saying that the any product with a Warrant of over 500 years must be quite good. The only thing is that what I should have read the year as was - 2549 B.E (Buddhist Era) which when converted is really 2007 A.D (Gregorian Calendar).

The thing is that the Thai Calendar is 543 years ahead of the rest of the world. Now how cool is that for Jet Lag...ha ha. However you should remember that there are a few exceptions and everything is not that straight forward. Check this out - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_solar_calendar