"Kung Hei Fat Choi"

Entering the year of the rabbit...

"Kung Hei Fat Choi" or Happy New Year ... earlier this month it was Chinese New Year and for 3 days there were celebrations with red lanterns and images of the year of the rabbit dominating Bangkok.

Quinn's school celebrating Chinese new year

Quinn's school was also decorated with red lanterns as they celebrated the new year.  This is also the time for the dragon dances and Quinn, a duckling in her school (this sounds like the equivalent of a 'pheut' in Dutch universities), also did a little dance. The little dragon moved up and down and from side to side as the other children were playing the bells and tambourines.  All the evil spirits were either tricked and frightened by the noise of the little dragon image or they rolled over laughing at the sight of it.

This is my third post and the first post in February.  We've now been in Bangkok for over a month and I'm almost ashamed to say that we haven't missed Amsterdam for a second.  It's really quite disconcerting if you think about it but I guess we're generally happy here and life has been easy.

Quinn's garden of Eden

Quinn has fully adapted and as soon as she gets up she grabs her books and pulls us away from breakfast to go to school.  This is unbelievable and in one month of schooling here she's probably done more than during the whole of last year in Amsterdam.  I can only conclude that the highly subsidized daycare system in the Netherlands doesn't work; it's too expensive and it lacks quality.  Quinn's school here is private and the parents demand value for money.  If they think the value isn't there they will take there kids out of this school and put them into a school with a better reputation. Education is a simple business requiring limited resources.  As one would expect schools quickly become a commodity and here in Bangkok there are plenty of decent alternatives.  The result is that for less than a third of the price of Dutch daycare you get a much higher quality daycare despite living in what's probably the most expensive residential area in Bangkok.  As a proponent of free markets it doesn't get any clearer than this.

The little dragon dance ...

Just a final series of photos that is becoming fairly typical during our 'mall visits'.  In these hot climates malls are hard to avoid for the routine shopping.  Asian malls can be particularly noisy especially on weekends when there are a lot of sales shows with sales promoters trying to sell people stuff by shouting through microphones, past the point of distortion.  I've never understood the success of this practice as in my view any sane person should walk away.  Quinn hates the noise but she loves reading quietly ... so we escape into a book store, the Kinokuniya is her favorite.  What happens next is typical and look at the pictures ... I guess Asian kids don't like the noise either and prefer reading:

Quinn finds a friend & starts reading.

She's on to something & more kids like the idea

An aisle full of concentrating kids & Quinn struggling with a Thai book.