You Never Know What Will Turn Up.

Okay, let me start by telling you what I bought back from the market the other day:

6 Tropical Fish (for our small ornamental pond out side the office)

A big bunch of bananas

A roast chicken, spicy home made BBQ sauce and rice

A straw hat

5 tiny land crab shells filled with land crab pate

A small plastic gecko lizard

And a few big bunches of fresh herbs; Coriander, Lemon Grass, Basil

I just love the mad assortment of stuff that you can buy here…and so do all our Life Coaching Holiday Guests. Even more incredible than the diversity of things available here is the price. All the items above came to no more than a bottle of beer at Heathrow airport (actually a lot less).

On arrival I make sure that every guest has one of my badly drawn maps of the local area. The main point of this is making sure you know where all the best stuff is; hand made silk suit, Tiffany lamp shade, intricately hand carved wooden screen, foot massage, Chinese dumplings and chocolate sauce, silk hand bags and more bunches of orchids than you have seen in your life. Pretty soon our guests soon get the hang of it and the pull of local markets as well as the world famous Night Bazaar becomes a central point of their holiday.

Our lovely friend and quite possibly the kindest man on the planet Sonthaya is always running people around town to pick up various important pieces as part of their unofficial Retail Therapy Programme. We recently helped a guest stock up on printer ink cartridges that you can buy here for 50Baht ( £1 to you or I). She reckoned that she saved enough money on printer ink to pay for her flight…she’s probably right.

I loved going with Janine to buy half the flower market that we carefully wrapped up in damp newspaper and inserted in plastic bags before turning her suitcase into what looked like a miniature florists. I like to think of them in displays in prominent positions in Stockport 12 hours later.

A recent Life Coaching Holiday guest and good friend actually did buy a kitchen sink…or was it a bathroom sink; it was one or the other. It was beautiful; a dark blue ceramic self-standing bowl. We shipped it back for a fraction of the price that it would have cost to buy such a rare item of beauty back in London. Son is now in the process of shipping back 25 matching ceramic door handles…(they’re on there way!).

I’m not a great shopper (go in, buy it and get out asap usually works well for me) but here, in Thailand it’s different. There are incredible things for sale here that are affordable, or even dirt cheap, that you would struggle to find elsewhere. So whatever your interests; food, clothes, flowers, kitchen stuff, shoes….you name it, it’s here in abundance…just make sure you bring a spare suitcase (or ask Sonthaya where the suitcase shop is in the Night Bazaar, he knows the way off by heart!).

Happy Alternative Retail Therapy. Talk next week. Alex.