Mae Sai 05/01/2010 Happy Labor Day

It's May Day in parts of the world but it's Thai Labor Day here. On Labor Day almost everyone is off work and almost everything is closed.

We got up early and went to Tun & Hlong's laundry to drop off our bedding. It is new but the red dye is making other thing that touch it red. It needs to be washed so the dye stops running as I'm to old to catch it. Come on, at least a little smile at "to old to catch the red dye running".

We then stopped at the morning market and had "baht-to-go", a Thai style donut. I really like Atoo & Noi, the folks that have the "baht-to-go" place. We have watched Atoo get up every morning very early, 4:00 AM, and make these Thai style donuts.

I first met him about four years ago when he was doing it from a cart on wheels. Now he and his wife have a fixed stand in the middle of the morning market. Atoo and the family are always happy and always busy.

It was also fun to watch people sorting through the closes that one man had set our right across from Atoo's Baht-to-go stand.

We then took a little ride to the Mae Sai Guest House that they are tearing down. It is a land mark on the Mae Sai and the Myanmar (Burma) border. We'll write a complete picture story about that in the future. I have another story about the "charcoal mafia" that I want to write, also.

We bought ten used polypropylene bags, the kind you see for 25 Kg of rice, to use top put construction trash in. The plastic trash bags they sell here are very thin, 2 mil., and just break with broken tile, etc. The rice bags were 5 THB (15 US cents) each.

We cleaned up the place filling three of those bags with pieces of block, old mortar, broken tile, etc. We also swept all the floors and dusted off the window screens. The screens were very dirty with the dust from cutting tile.

We went to Tesco/Lotus after I took as shower to get all the dust and dirt off from cleaning. This big retail store was open and very busy. We had lunch there and I bought an electric hammer/drill to put anchors in the concrete walls and a four inch disc grinder.

I bought inexpensive, household quality tools at the cost of 1300 THB ($41 USD) for both. When we got home I unpacked them and tested them both. The 4" grinder worked okay but the hammer/drill started smoking when I plugged it in. Tesco/Lotus has a good return policy so back we go.

We exchanged the tool and plugged it in there to make sure it worked. I'm glad we bought these at Tesco/Lotus as other places, here in Thailand, would have hassled us about returning them.

We also took the kitchen sink to a machine shop that was open, a block from our house, and had the hole cut in it for the faucet. When we did that we realized the sink was maede very thin.

We then decided that the stainless steel sink that Salad furnished was not of very good quality. Since it will be set in ceramic tile we are going to go buy a top of the line sink tomorrow morning. This is the wrong place to worry about spending 50-100 dollars extra for a sink.

We'll go to HOME MART in the morning and see if they have a high quality sink.