Thailand Trip

Dear Friends and Family,

We finally bought a reliable VPN that appears to get us past the Chinese firewall so hopefully we are back on our blog without interruptions.

Ingrid Solomon left a week a ago after a really nice visit with us.

We are now on a 6 day holiday for National Day and Moon Festival and are taking it easy in Beijing. The government with their cloud seeding has provided spectacular weather, mid 70s and blue skies. Friday Astri and I spent a day biking into the heart of Beijing with a restaurant we had read about as our destination. It was a small Chinese restaurant in a Hutong with very good food. Yesterday we spent the day at China Open tennis tournament and today Astri's sister, Martha, and our niece, Marit arrive.

Work remains an adventure doing many different things including completing designs on our out-patient cancer center. Quite a few changes in the hospital with the Chief Medical Officer leaving, an interim CMO, and a new CMO from Ohio that just signed on to arrive in January. Looking for new Ob and Pediatric chiefs. 16 physicians coming in next 3 weeks to take their exams and hopefully join the staff in the next few months.

We had a great week in Thailand in early September. I attended a two day 3rd East Asian Lung Cancer Conference in Bangkok and we had a few days to see Bangkok but the best was a 3 day bike ride. We were met at 7AM and after a 2 1/2 hour drive got a tour of the Bridge over the River Kwai and the museum of the famous battle. We also biked up to "hellfire pass" where 90,000 lives of slave laborors, many who were POWs were lost building the railway to Burma. We took a train for an hour and then started our ride. First day over roads and very muddy track and arrived at a beautiful resort on the river. Then biked most of the 2nd day with beautiful scenery on quiet roads and arrived at another very nice resort hotel. That night we had a well-deserved Thai massage. We then biked a good part of the 3rd day before driving back and arriving in Bangkok at 7PM. Great local food, beautiful waterfall, stopped at the sounds of schoolchildren singing. We had a wonderful guide,Noom, an assistant who was learning the route, driver with van and one other rider, a 30 yo Belgian working in Hong Kong as CFO for oil company. Let us know who you think he looks like. We had a great time. We then hired Noom for a tour of Bangkok the next day.

Thailand is a lovely country. Bangkok is very busy and noisy but very interesting and easy to get around by subway and skytrain but the traffic is awful and makes Beijing look quiet. The food is excellent but very spicy. Their love of the King is overwhelming as are the number of pictures of him. Everyone knows of the 3000 wonderful projects he is responsible for but no one can say anything bad about him. Hmmmm! Buddhism also seems to have many inconsistencies but then what religion doesn't? There certainly are a lot of temples and Buddhas such as the reclining one in the slide show.

Hope you are all well and look forward to hearing from many of you.

Philip

You can click on the slideshow to go to the gallery.