This is Robert, manager of Thai Restaurant Chiang Mai in Hilversum (Holland).
In Thailand his name is pronounced as `Lob Bird' which means `bomb' or `explosion'.
He obviously didn't like being shot during this photo session.

In the upper left corner of the pic you see a nice tapestry. If you ever go to Thailand (again) and you also want to buy this kind of tapestry, then don't spend your money in Bangkok (prices there are way too high), but travel north to Mae Sai, the border city between Thailand and Myanmar (the present name for Burma). Everything there is very cheap and it's a true shopper's paradise. And the nice thing is that you can also cross the border there (for one day you don't need visa but only US$ 20 and a copy of your passport) and visit sister city Tachileik on the Birmese side of the Mae Sai river that separates both countries.

One of Robert's favourite hobbies is downloading MP3 files from the Web.
These are sound files in almost CD quality and relatively small in size. Every night he downloads a new chart buster (size between 4 and 6 Mb) from this Dutch site. This addictive habit will sure fill up his hard disks very soon...

One of Robert's other favourite hobbies is peeling off labels from empty Mekhong bottles, and then scanning them and putting them on his homepage. Weird, isn't it? Especially because Mekhong (marketed as `Thai rum') has an awful taste. Fortunately there is also a better variety for sale, called Mekong Superior, which comes in a bottle with a black label. Mekhong is produced by the Bangyikhan Distillery in Pathum Thani, under Thai Government Supervision. We did not succeed in finding a Mekhong homepage however. Can you?

Some more personal information

As owner of our Thai restaurant I do my work in the background. Our guests expect to see Thai people and Thai things when they come to visit us, so I don't want to spoil our image by showing my white farang caucasian face during opening hours. Not being visible there all the time, gives me a chance to do some other work too. First I do a lot of work for The Document Company (translating brochures and technical stuff in Dutch, interviewing captains of industry, writing testimonials and contributions to various publications) and when I am really in the mood I work on our full-colour family magazine De Stille Graaf which should appear on a monthly basis but in reality is published less frequently.
For the lay-out I use the dtp program Ventura Publisher (developed by Xerox but now owned by Corel) and it is printed with a HP Deskjet 690C, which I also use for printing the pics I shoot with my digital still camera (a Sony Mavica MVC-FD7). Before I also used a Canon Powershot 600, but that one was stolen during a burglary at our house a couple of months ago.
And then there is my (very secret) work as a ghost writer. I rewrite, restyle and edit texts written by Dutch writers who want to become famous in the world of literature. My latest project is ghostwriting for Dutch real estate tycoon and (now) succesful author Kees Quirijns. If you want, you can read a fragment (in Dutch) from his latest novel De parabel van Gunsalvo which will be published (after being heavily edited by me) next september.

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