Hostpapa, did you kill our dreams like Freddy Krueger?

We’ve been without internet the last 3 days and have come to find our site is down. All of our posts, pages and comments had vanished. It seems our web host, hostpapa severs went down and around the same time we lost everything and our database shrunk to 0mb. Sent an email to hostpapa support and got a response saying “We don’t backup customer files, it’s up to you. case closed”

I have to say it’s pretty shitty customer service from hostpapa.ca No apology, no explanation why the servers crashed, no nothing. The only way I knew their servers went down (which they didn’t admit) is because I have a third party reporting service for outages. Also a friend of ours uses hostpapa and she actually got an email.. where the hell was ours?

Anyways, so we drank our troubles away through many pitchers of BeerLao, pool with the A-Team and many whisky cokes. This morning instead of tubing we nursed our hangovers and got ready to get our dream back up and running again. Lo and behold, I do an upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress and it magically all reappeared like nothing happened.

My guess is that hostpapa realized that killing baby kittens is wrong and decided to make it up with this magic. But really, did wordpress magically have a backup we didn’t know about somewhere in cyberland?

None the less, sorry for the hiccup, we’re now back to our regularly scheduled program starting Monday.

We met a family of pretty darn cute Pomeranians during our stay at Sam’s Place in Kanchanaburi. The youngest, BeeBo, is competing in this years “Who’s the Cutest Pomeranian?” contest. A yearly event showcasing cute Pom’s from across the world. A very tough competition to be in and judge as all Pom’s are born with that “I’M SO HAPPY YOU JUST CAN’T HELP TO TALK ALL HIGH PITCHED AND FUNNY AT ME” look to them.

BeeBo was kind enough to show us some of his cute techniques that he plans to use to win this years contest, here are just a few of his skills.

Extreme close ups are not a problem

Cute begging technique from afar

And the closer… how can you not love this face?

You get them BeeBo!! But you really has some tough tough competition to go up against… just look at last years winner:

Look at those scamming eyes!

“We were picked up at the airport and told the driver Don Meaung Airport. He confirmed it and drove us to the wrong airport even though we told him another 5 times. Now we’re here and he wants the 500 shown on the meter, but he drove us the wrong way. The fair should be 150 bath, 200 tops. I’ve offered him a fair price 3 times, even went up to 300 bath and he refuses anything but the full amount.”

He is not on your side. Try to deal with tourist police instead if you can.

We were now becoming extremely late and had just checked our bags in. Our plane was leaving in 10 minutes and we still had to clear security. This whole thing was taking up a stupid amount of time and we had to go. After a couple of precious minutes the officer came back to me and said “He says you just said airport. If you don’t pay he wants to file a police report. This will take an hour. Or you can pay 400 bath and I’ll make sure it goes away.”

At this point the option was pretty clear, and I think they all knew it. Our flight was worth 20 times that amount and we couldn’t afford to lose it. So, I gave up and threw the money at them and wondered how this would of all laid out if the tourist police were actually there instead of sleeping in. Luckily to our advantage we were in a small domestic airport and we cleared security super quick, making it onto our plane just moments before the doors closed.

This whole situation really pissed me off while we were on the plane. We had blatantly been ripped off, the taxi driver absolutely going the wrong way to get a higher meter. There is no chance we only said “airport” to the driver multiple times and we could tell the officer knew that himself but didn’t care. Feeling very frustrated, I fired off an email to Suk 11 (thanks to my iPhone!) and their reply back was that we shouldn’t have taken that taxi! The guards are supposed to call in a taxi right to the door as the ones on the street have been known to cause problems.

Just goes to show you, you do have to be on your toes at all times. But what else can you really do? Have you been scammed in a taxi? What did you do?