New Central Plaza

On Thursday, a new mall opened on Chaeng Wattana Road. The name is Central Plaza, and it is run by the premier plaza group here in Thailand. Here they use the term plaza instead of mall because some company has the trademark to mall or some other such nonsense.

The new Central Plaza is very nice. While its not quite as nice as the Central World downtown, it is very solid. It has two book stores that sell English books (Asia Books sells exclusively English language books) and there is even a pretty decent camera store there. There are a lot of good restaurants renting space as well. They have a movie theater on the seventh floor. Of course, there is the Central Department store anchoring the whole thing. Central is kind of like the Macey's of Thailand.

The Top's grocery store on the bottom floor is a huge plus. Its a lot easier to grocery shop there if I also need to pick up other non-grocery items.

The one thing I wish it had was a Toys-R-Us. Still, Central has a decent, albeit expensive, toy section.

If traffic is light, I can probably get to the mall within five or six minutes. I visited on Friday afternoon, and there was not a lot of traffic. In the evenings,h however, Chaeng Wattana can be quite busy. Tim and I, however, think that we can actually get there via some back roads, which would make traffic even less of a concern. If that is true, I could even ride my bike there.

A Scare

Two days ago, Nalin came in the house and told me while she was playing out in front of our house, that a Thai man in a truck told her to get into the truck. She said that she grabbed her toys and her sister, and ran into the house.

Needless to say, it gave me a bit of a scare. I'm not one prone to believe in the child predator roaming the neighborhoods of America (or Thailand). This wasn't a second or third hand story though. This was from my daughter.

So I call Tim and walk with the girls to the guard at the entrance of our complex. I wanted Tim to explain to the guard what happened. As we approached the guard station, Nalin points to a man talking to the guard and says he was the culprit (my word not hers). He started waving and smiling at them. I mentioned that fact to Tim, and gave the guard my phone. Tim, however, thought that I had given it to the driver and asked him about his conversation with the girls. There was general confusion at that point.

When Tim returned from work, she talked to the guard and by that time, I had gotten a little more of the story from Nalin. It turns out that the stranger was actually the driver for my neighbor across the street. The driver and his wife have worked for the neighbor for many years and live there. Nalin later told me that he was actually walking towards the neighbors house when he spoke to her.

I don't believe that the guy was trying to abduct the kids. I'm not sure if he was telling someone else to get in the car, if Nalin misunderstood him, or he was trying to make some sort of joke. It just doesn't add up to an abduction. He wasn't trying to grab her, and wasn't even in the car when he allegedly said to get in. There are a lot of people playing and walking about, so it would be a huge risk to try to take someone in broad daylight. Doing it on front of your own house where you will be easiy recognized would require a monumental leap of stupidity.

Although she was never really in any danger, I let Nalin know that she did the right thing in getting herself and her sister to safety. I told her that next time she should leave her toys behind and just worry about getting to safety. I also let her know that it is a good idea to yell her head off at that point. She didn't seem to mind that suggestion too much.

Update

Well, it seems like I confused some people with my post last week about our trip. We are actually leaving on Thursday morning (3/27) to go to Krabi. We'll return on Sunday the 30th.

Tim and I went out with a real estate agent on Monday to look at some houses. We can terminate our lease in July, and we are thinking of moving to a different house in Nichada. The townhouse that we live in now is not bad, there are a just a lot of steps and it seems like things have been breaking. Not big things, but just lots of little things.

We really haven't decided whether we want to rent or buy. If we buy a house, then we will keep it as an investment property or sell it when we leave. One thing that we have decided is that we are going to stay in Nichada. We could get more for our money elsewhere, but its location relative to the school is a compelling draw.

We went and visited about a dozen or so places. Some of the places were for sale, and some for rent. Some of the places were privately owned, and some owned by the Nichada group and rented out.

Out of the dozen or so places we visited, I think that there were 4 or so that we thought were nice. All of those were only for rent and not for sale. I think our favorite was a house that had a pool just outside the patio doors, and a common play area for kids outside the back gate. This house, like the others we liked, had a more open floor plan.

One common theme of the places that we didn't like was the closed floor plan. In a lot of the Thai houses, the rooms are very much separated and distinct. Many don't flow into each other. Thais tend to close off the kitchen or keep it distinct in order to keep the smell of the food from the main part of the house.

I was a bit surprised at how poorly some people presented the houses that they were selling. Tim pointed out that it was different for the rental property. The property for rent generally looked very nice and well kept. The property for sale looked, as Tim described it, as something that they just wanted to rid themselves of. Take for example the house we visited where we were greeted by a rusty metal gate, a rusty bike in the drive way, paper garbage piled in the driveway, and a swimming pool that was half filled with yellowish brown water. The house itself had other issues, but the initial presentation was off putting. Its not like they were offering the house as a cheap fixer up, the purchase price of this would have been significantly more than our house in the U.S. How much could it cost to drain the pool, paint the fence, move the bike and clean up some paper refuse? Probably less than the lost sales opportunity or reduced sales price.