I am in no way an aspiring chef, but I have always liked to play around with food to see what I can cook up. It normally turns out pretty good if I should say it myself, and I rarely experience any kitchen nightmares. I guess those are the domain of Gordon Ramsey who has become my favourite chef and television personality. Should you have lived in a cave the past years, this is who Gordon Ramsey is:

Gordon James Ramsay, OBE (born November 8, 1966 in Johnstone, Scotland) is a Scottish chef, television personality and entrepreneur. He has been awarded a total of twelve Michelin stars, and as of April 2008 is one of only three chefs in the UK whose restaurant is rated at three Michelin stars. He is famous in the UK for presenting TV programmes about competitive cookery and food such as Hell’s Kitchen and The F-Word. He is best known in the United States as the host of FOX’s Hell’s Kitchen, which premiered in May 2005, and of Kitchen Nightmares, which premiered in September 2007, based on his successful British show Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

In addition to this he is probably best know for using the F-Word several times during his television shows, I believe it has been counted that he used it more than 50 times during a 60 minute television program. Do not let that put you of, the guy is simply brilliant in what he does.

I found a video clip on You Tube from when he went to Norway (my native country), did a dive to catch a kingcrab and then cooked it on the spot. Here it is:

You can find both Hell’s Kitchen (the US version is better than the UK version), Kitchen Nightmares, The F-Word and several videos with great cooking tips on You Tube. just do a search fro it and get hooked. He has also written several great cookery books and made several DVD’s that can be bought from a bookstore og E-bay.

Sources used: Wikipedia.com.

A important reason for this website is that my friends should be able to keep track of me. And when months went by and no new posts appeared I began to get e-mails asking me “where are you?”. Instead of doing the easy thing and update my website a year ago I send everyone a reply where I told them that I was OK, but that my life was a bit messy. I also promised a detailed explanation at a later stage to satisfy their curiosity, and here it is.

My first posts in my diary is written in Norwegian, as some of my non-norwegian speaking friends have had some trouble working those out I will in the future write in English. But please remember that English is not my native language so you will most certainly find grammatical errors here, when you do, please continue reading and do not mind them.

Well, to keep my non-norwegian speaking friends satisfied I will do a brief explanation on my life just before and after I moved to Thailand so you can better understand what has happened the past year.

I worked for the Norwegian Armed Forces as a Computer Engineer and was married to a indonesian girl, when I suddenly got an early mid life crises. Within a week I for some unknown reason decided to quit the job I had had for years, get out of a marriage I had been in for years and find a unknown path in life. And so I did, got myself a airline ticket to Thailand and ended up in the land of smile with a small amount of money and no idea on what to do.

My friends thought I was crazy, and I got to admit that it was crazy. I got no idea why I did it and it still pussle me from time to time. But what had been done was done so in the middle of Bangkok I tried to come up with a plan. And my plan became to have no plan and just see what life had in store for me. After a while I got involved with a girl from south of Thailand, did some work on a couple of websites I had at the time and life went on. That relationship ended after almost 2 years and I was single again.

After a while I found the love of my life. She is half Thai and half English and was on her way home to England when I first met her. For me it was love at first sight and after a while she felt the same for me. We moved to Pattaya, lived there for more than a year and enjoyed the beaches, friends and so on. She checked out a couple of schools for further education, and I found out that if I should survive down here I needed to get something to do. And as I already was a diver I checked out the possibilities of becoming a PADI Divemaster.

It’s when things go smooth you can expect trouble, and so was also the case here. My girlfriend got her parent down on a visit, and even if they had never met me they had decided not to like me. So when she went of to meet them on Koh Samui, they did what they could to separate us. And it worked, because when I met her again she was a very different person. Just a month later she disappeared without a word or trace.

As I had no idea on what had happened I did my best to find her, and in the end I was told by someone else that she was OK and that I should just go on with my life and she would be back at some point. So I headed of to Phuket where I did my PADI Divemaster with Scandinavian Divers in Patong. Me and Jan Rune, a fellow norwegian who is a good friend, had checked them out over Internet and decided that we would try them out.

Diplomatically I can say that our PADI Divemaster course could have been better, in my view at least. But we did get trough it and as soon as it was done we did our PADI Instructor Development Course and PADI Instructor Examination. In short both me and Jan Rune became PADI Instructors in 2005 and got a job at Scandinavian Divers.

After a month I was told that there was possibilities to work at Koh Phi Phi, which is located 1 hour and 30 minutes by boat from Phuket. The islands became famous after the Hollywood movie “The Beach”. So I went over and got a job straight away at Island Divers, where I had done all my dive courses up to Rescue Diver some years earlier.

Found myself a room for rent and worked between 15 and 20 hour days every day of the week. And I absolutely loved it. It was fantastic to be able to teach people to dive and see the smile on their faces after their first open water dive when they had seen a turtle or shark. A year went and suddenly one evening I got a phone call. It was a girl in the other end but she would not say who she was, after a while I figured out that it was my girlfriend who had decided to appear again.

After she left me with a friend she had been fooled by her friend who had stolen most of her money. With what she had left she had tried to win enough money to survive in Bangkok by gambling. As she is half Thai it did not surprise me at all that she had gone to that step. After she had lost what she had left, and much more she fled to England and her wealthy parents. She had not told them about the whole thing as she knew they would become extremely upset. And now she was back in Thailand and had no idea on what to do.

The next phase in my life can be called “losing my mind”. As she was, is and always will be my true love in life I wanted to make everything right for her. So I asked her how much she owed people, and she gave me a pretty high number, so high that I had problems grasping it at first. Then I told her to wait in Bangkok, where she was, and I would come the next day. And next day I had booked us in on a a nice hotel by the riverside. Then things went fast. I got hold of my bank and told them to move all my money to an account I could use within the next hour, went to the bank and withdrawn the money and gave it to her. The manager of the bank asked me discreetly several times if I was sure I wanted to do this, as he had probably seen it before. I said I did.

Within a couple of hours the people she owed money to came to the hotel and collected it and she was free of debth. She thanked me all evening and as she was aware of that it was a loan, told me that she would pay me back as soon as she could. Her wealthy parents had given her some real estate that she was in the process of selling so I would get it pretty soon.

A couple of days later she took of with a friend to see the “Bridge over river Kwai” while I headed to Phuket. After a week she came down to meet me in Phuket and we had 3 really nice weeks together. Everything was back to as it had been before and life was great. After 3 weeks she had to meet up with her parents again and she promised that we would be back together again in 10 days.

We talked on the phone several times daily for the first days. Then I lost my cellular phone and when I was lucky enough to get it back again one day later I saw that she had tried to call me 4 times. So I tried to phone her, but nobody picked up the phone. And that went on for days, and at some point I understood that she had changed her SIM card and I got no way to contact her again.

I do understand that the whole thing seems unbelievable, and that I must be the king of idiots. But remember that this girl ment and mean more to me than anything else on earth. Some people have asked me if I belive I will ever see her again, well I actually do think that I will. At some point she will find me again or I will find her. Got no idea what will happen from there, but the way I know her tell me that we will meet again.

Anyway, I went back to Koh Phi Phi and became an SSI Instructor as well as Island Divers decided to become a SSI dive shop. And I worked hard until a couple of weeks ago when I went on a holiday. It can be pretty hard to work that many hours every day of the week and always be service minded towards all your customers. So I needed a holiday. What I will do during my holiday will be in my next diary post.

Hope this satisfied the curiosity for some, and please add a comment if there are more questions on top of your head.