Pink Party: The best/worst night everrrr

Mike, one of our friends from TEFL, invited us to his "Pink" birthday party last night. We showed up at the meeting place and up pulls a GIANT, two level tour bus..... it was AWESOME! I'd guess that there was probably about forty of us that hopped on. It was the coolest party bus EVERRRRRR - there was even coolers of beer waiting for us inside!! We drank all the way to Surin Beach which I think is the best beach on the island. Such a cool birthday!








The bad part of the night came after the party bus dropped us off at our car and we were driving home. Brandon was driving (because he's always our sober-sister) and as we were turning into our apartment, a guy on a motorbike slammed into our car. Oh my god. I've never jumped out of a car so fast - I ran around the back side of the car and saw a dumped bike and blood everywhere. There was at least a full two cups of blood splattered all over the pavement..... but no person. oh my god, oh my god - I was sure he was dead in a ditch 10 feet away or something. But no, he was pacing/limping back and fourth holding his hands on his bleeding head. I grabbed him and tried and tried to get him to sit down but he REFUSED and just kept "sorry madam." He was drunk. Big time. The poor guy was 27 years old (we found out later) and he wasn't wearing a helmet. I can't believe he wasn't killed yet alone walking around!!! Our back window was shattered and there was a huge dent on the back of our trunk - how is he ok???? Ten staff people from our apartment came out to the road to help (yes, they really do work at 2am - it's sooooo weird). Poor Brandon had to heard me away and force Josh to take Nelly back to the room (she was seriously blacked out and it turns out that she didn't remember any of this). He was scared that the cops were going to see a bunch of drunk Americans dressed in Pink and automatically blame us for the accident. Side note: for those of you that don't know Brandon, he was completely sober (as always). That's why his nick name is Juice, actually. I felt so bad for him; EVERYONE came to the scene (cuz that's how it works in Thailand)...the insurance company rep, the rental company guy, the apartment staff, the ambulance drivers, the cops - and of course no one could speak English except for our apartment manager who was piss drunk. Poor Brandon!! He thought they were all talking about how they should just shoot the stupid American and dump him in a ditch to solve the problem!!

Anyways, long story short: the kid admitted full fault because he was driving on the wrong side of the road (they do that alllllll the time on motorbikes), speeding and he was drinking. He was breathalyzed and he was a .12% so I guess that's why he didn't think he was hurt. He has to pay our insurance's deductible (2,000 baht = $57.) and he has to go to Jail for three days. Poor guy. He was a drunk driver but I still feel really, really bad. Brandon (who blew a 0%) was cleared of all charges but he had to sit at the police station until 4:00am. Our car rental company woke us up the next morning when they brought us a new Toyota Vios (like a Camery). Hopefully we'll have better luck with this one. I HATE DRIVING HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kill me now.

I never, ever thought I'd say this. But maybe working at Mercy Corps wasn't that bad.

I just got done teaching my very first class at Plookpanya: a Government school in Phuket-Town. It was NOTHING like what I expected.

Josh dropped me off at the entrance of my school right at at 8am just as all the students were lined up and singing the national anthem. There were hundreds of uniformed children in perfect, straight rows - it was unbelievably adorable. As I was walking in I was so excited to be a "real" teacher; I was sure that I had found my life calling!! ....but then I met my class. Oh my god.

Adorable? Yes. Evil? Definitely. I haven't seen such such misbehaved kids since I went to walmart (Six years ago... before I KNEW). My first class was ten year-olds and consisted of six girls and two boys that were angels and twenty terrible, screaming, obnoxious, violent, WILD boys. THEY WOULDN'T SIT DOWN!! They kept making fun on me in Thai and throwing things at the girls in the front row. My classroom is a science lab which means they kept sneaking over to the drawers and finding knives, bunsun burners, glass beakers and other things to break and throw.

Here's what I tried:
- Shouting "nip-nip" which means be quiet in Thai
- slamming my binder against the wall to get everyone's attention
- taking away their cell phones and rulers (which they kept slapping on the tables to make noise
- grabbing kids by the arm and forcing them to sit down
- telling them that they'll get candy at the end of class only if they're good

They thought it was all hilarious. It was especially frustrating because I spent SIX HOURS putting together a perfect lesson plan and those little brats made it impossible for me to teach.

At one point, a Thai teacher came into my room and slapped the hell out of two on the worst boys. Wow. I was shocked. But I was even more shocked about my reaction. I didn't feel sorry for the kids at all. I've read all of Brie's blog entries about Tanzanian teachers that beat the students and it made me SO SAD. But now, as far as I'm concerned, almost all of my students should have gotten kicked in the head. I think I did a really good job of looking calm as they screamed and freaked out for an hour straight but as soon as they all FINALLY left my class room I almost cried!!! AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

My next two classes.... fuck them too. When Josh picked me up I was pretty much distraught and he had to talk me out of quitting. Later, we went to our placement agency so that I could make my lesson plan/worksheets for the next day and I ran into Rob: the teacher that had my kids last year. Rob has been teaching in Thailand for five years and he told me that without a doubt my classes are the very worst kids on the whole island. He kept saying how sorry he was for me. He said that he didn't blame me if I quit but he thinks I should stick it out because if I can teach at Plookpanya, I can handle any class in the world. And he said I definitely need to start hitting the kids.

Ohhhhhhhhhh, and then there's the school itself. Here's how my day went.... When I got to my school I had to talk to at least ten teachers in the main office before one of them knew what to do with me. Eventually someone showed me to my classroom and left me. My room - locked. Thank god I found another teacher to unlock my room but by then I only had a few minutes before my class was scheduled to begin. And guess what.... ALL of the tables/chairs are stacked up in one corner. PANIC!! Ok, fine. As fast as I could I unstacked everything and set up my whole classroom. I run out of my room and down the hall to another class room to see what time it is (because there's NO CLOCK in my room) and I see that it's 8:50 - my kids should have arrived five minutes ago. Great. They ended up being 20 MINUTES LATE! But it's fine because my classroom was SOOOO trashed. Literally. I picked up a whole trash bag full of papers which I added to the six other giant trash bags that were stacked in the corner of my room. WTF???

It's 93 degrees, is there air conditioning? No. Do I have a desk? Hell no. Do I have a chair? Ha! Chalk board? Yes but no chalk and no erasers/rags. Attendance list? "None available." Did I get a tour of the school? Ohhh no - I can't even find my way back to the office. Bathrooms - there's one western toilet in the whole school (the rest are "squat toilets") and THANK GOD I found it. As I was walking into the western restroom I saw that the floor was soaked.... oh no.... oh nooooo.... a hose; that means no toilet paper. NO TOILET PAPER! Amazingly I had toilet paper in my bag and soap too BECAUSE THERE'S NO SOAP IN THIS WHOLE SCHOOL! So gross. I hate this country.


5/26/09
So yeah, I have the job from hell. But it gets worse...... the very first school that we stopped at on our job-searching day had an opening that Josh and I were both qualified for (TEFL/Degree). He's been stressed about $$ so I didn't fill out an application so that he'd automatically get the job. I don't want to sound like a bitch but we all knew that if I applied there's a huge chance that I'd be a shoe in just because I'm a girl. 80-95% of Western teachers in Thailand are males which makes us girls a hot comodoty at ALL schools. So anyway, of course he almost immediately got the job (without an interview) and started the next day. His students...... SUPER respectful. Air conditioning.... everywhere. Lesson plans..... oh yeah. Chair..... leather. He got a "buddy" that gave him a TOUR and intruduced him to the employee whose job is to MAKE COPIES for the English department. I DON'T EVEN HAVE A COPY MACHINE!! He gets free lunches too. Each of his classes has an attendance list and even a "class secretary" that helps him with passing out worksheets and anything else he needs. And guess what..... he gets paid the same as I do but he works exactly HALF THE HOURS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I thought I left Battle Ground...

Every aspect of applying for jobs in Thailand would warrant a huge lawsuit back home.

The first eight questions on EVERY single school's application:

1) Name ___________
2) Male___ Female___
3) Age____
4) Height_____ Weight _____
5) Religion _________
6) Nationality _______ Race______ * Please attach color photo
7) Single___ Married ____
8) Do you have any physical disabilities? ____

As I mentioned before, if you're anything other than white, you're apparently NOT going to get an English teaching job anywhere in this country. The majority of job postings flat out say "only white candidates are welcome to apply." Some postings go as far as to list an acceptable weight range. As for religion, we've heard that the right answer is "Christian" but I still can't bring myself to write it!! Nelly tried but she didn't know the spelling.

Last week we applied to a placement agency with tons of open teaching positions. Brandon, Josh and Nelly all received job offers and I got an e-mail asking if I was Asian and if not, to please send additional color photos. Oh my god. I got the job once they saw my round eyes but I think I'm still to mortified to accept. And yesterday we met a hiring manager that told Brandon and Josh that only women are eligible to be Kindergarten teachers at his school. Hmmm

T.I.T.: This is Thailand

Stuff I've observed in Thailand:

-When you order food in a resturant everyone's meal shows up at a different time. There's been several times that one of us has gotten our food a full 15 minutes before anyone else. Just yesterday Nelly, Josh and I were DONE eating our meals for at least five minutes before Brandon's food came out. A couple of times two of us have gotten our food at the same time but there's never been once that we've gotten our food all at the same time.

-So apparently Thai girls are considered unattractive by Thai men if they have dark skin. Here's how it was explained to me: a tan thai girl is unattractive in thailand just as a fat girl is unattractive in America. I'm sure it must be true because all the Thai billboards, commercials and advertisements have pasty-white models on them. And then there's the whitening cream..... whitening cream is sold EVERYWHERE. Even Chanell has a line of whiteners. ALL (and I mean all) lotions, deodorants, moisturizers, and sunblocks have whiteners in them. During the day you always see Thai girls wearing long-sleved sweaters, hats and scarves around their faces (in the 100 degree heat) so that they don't get tan. Before I got here I heard that you'll never see a thai girl on the beach and it's pretty much true. The only ones I've seen carry around umbrellas to block the sun. I wonder what the Thai girls would think if they knew that Americans went tanning and did fake-n-baking?!?!

-We learned in our TEFL course that in Thailand you're expected to list your "personal information" at the top of your resume/CV. You have to list your date of birth, nationality, sex, marital status and many employers even require a photo. Unbelievable. It's 100% legal (and normal) to discriminate based on race, sex and age, and schools are totally open about it. With job postings the most common thing I've noticed is the phrase "Asian Americans are not welcome to apply." TEFL told us that many schools will only hire white people in their 20's. I read that if you're asian or black that it's next to impossible to get a teaching job here. As they say: TIT (this is Thailand).

-Cars do NOT stop for pedestrians in this country..... AT ALL. There's crosswalks everywhere but if you step into one NO ONE will even slow down. Once you've waited however long and dodged your way to the center of the street, you'll have to wait in the middle of the freaking road to wait for a gap in the traffic from the opposite direction. It's insane. There's been several times that it's been pouring rain (rain is MUCH more intense here than back home) and it's taken me a good three or four minutes to cross the road because no one will stop.

-Motorbikes. Everyone has one!! If you pull up to a market or a mall you'll see literally hundereds, sometimes thousands of bikes. There must be 20 bikes for every car on this Island!! And it's amazing to see how many people they can fit onto one bike. Several times we've seen four people plus a baby on one little bike. It's insane!! And yes, I did say baby.... aparently it's not child abuse to hold an infant with one arm while you're weaving through traffic going 65mph+!!

-Driving is insane in this country. We've seen two car accidents in the past two weeks but I'm surprised we haven't seen 50 more. People here are wreckless on their tiny bikes!! And it's especially scary because more offten than not there's multiple people on one bike and if there's any helmets at all there's usually only one. I hate how you'll see a dad with a helmet on but his eight-year old son doesn't have one. And there's TONSSSSS of husbands with helmets on but the wife never has one. Unbelievable!!

-People actually eat Durian here. Durian is a "fruit" that literally smells like decaying flesh. Most nice hotels have signs saying that Durian is NOT permittend because it smells soooooo strong and soooooo bad! The two grocery stores that we go to have durian and I can't look at anything in the produce section because the durian smell is too overwhelming. I hate it!!

-When you buy a beer from a 7-11 they ask you if you'd like it to be opened.

Our Fishbowl

Our whip!! We lovingly call her "the fishbowl"

Josh keeps telling me to make a Will

Oh my god - I think I have feline AIDS! There can be no other explanation. It has been exactly 36 hours since I've been dealing with these weird, awful stomach cramps. Sometimes they happen every 15 minutes and other times they they don't happen for a couple hours. We're all sure I'm going to die. Brandon and Josh are thrilled because Brandon took a $50k life insurance policy out on me before we left.

Maybe I should go to the hospital?? I think all the free radicals that I got while working at Mercy Corps are finally catching up to me. God damn you people!!! ...you know who you are!!

ELEPHANTS!!

Today was SO AMAZING!! As a "graduation present" Brandon took me to ride elephants here in Phuket. Firstly, I have to point out that Brandon chose this place in particular because they're the only place on the island that's certified for humane treatment of the animals. The cows and other livestock at this place are by far the fattest, cleanest and disease free that I've seen in this whole country (not that that's saying anything at all) but still, they really did look normal.
So, not only did we get to ride ADORABLE elephants, we got to ride a water buffalo (which promptly licked my face and slobbered all over me - I loved it) and even raft down a little river that lead to the ocean. It was such a fun day - except for one part.... monkeys. People that know me well know that I hate, hate, hate those evil, unpredictable, beady-eyed, killing machines!! But what does Brandon do? He makes me touch one! Back when I believed in reincarnation I was positive that I was murdered by one of those nasty THINGS! Oh well, I got back at Brandon by volunteering him for a muay thai match even though he has a sprained ankle. HAHAHAAAA!!!




Josh and Nelly


If I had known what I was getting into (without health/life insurance) I wouldn't have done this!!


In my monkey picture I was near tears but Nelly loved the evil thing:

Thai Dogs

The animals here make me want to throw up on a daily basis. If the beaches weren't so amazing I'd probably tell my dog-lover friends to stay away just because of the condition of the animals here. Ashley/"Candi", you'd just die!! There's tons and tons of stray animals in this country. Anywhere you go, if you walk three blocks you're going to see at least 15 dogs and all 15 of them will have something MAJORLY wrong with them. Extreme mange, half an ear missing, abscesses, wort things around their eyes, crooked/broken/missing limbs and tails - it's sad! I haven't seen a non-emaciated dog yet. Maybe before I leave I'll buy a gun and go on a dog/cat killing spree. It would be the most compassionate act of my entire life.

The towel incident

Our apartment complex is also a hotel which benefits us because that means we get maid service, fresh sheets every week and the best part: new towels. Living at a hotel definitely has its drawbacks; mainly the three tour busses full of screaming, giggling chinese teenagers that arrive almost every weekend - but that's another story. Back to the towels.... a couple days after we moved into the apartment complex I was walking through the lobby alone on my way out to the car. I was almost to the car when a tiny child laborer (there's several children that WORK at our place) flagged me down and motioned for me to comeback inside. One of the receptionists handed me her cell phone and told me that Tai (their English speaking manager) needed to talk to me. Basically she told me that she was going to charge us for RUINING for towels . Meanwhile, the 15 receptionists have laid out three of my towels in the middle of the lobby and one is being held up by another child laborer while they all point to little marks on the towels. EMBARRASSING!!!!! I haven't mentioned this before but I need to explain that Thai businesses almost always have about five times the necessary number of employees working any given shift. SO that
means that there was about 15 employees talking about my dirty laundry. Anyways, the marks on the towels were obviously Nelly's and my mascara they told me that it hadn't come out in the wash. I may have been born at night but not last night; I know that
Nelly's and my makeup definitely comes out in the was and besides, they couldn't have washed/dryed the towels already because they had only collected them about an hour ago! We're used to being lied to constantly in this country so that's not the part
that bothered me - it was obviously the fact that they had all my towels laid out (in front of other guests too) and kept repeatedly saying "dirty, dirty, dirty." I almost died! I eventually convinced them not to charge us because Nelly and I hand washed all the mascara spots but it was still soooo embarrassing. Stupid Thai hotels!!!

Stereotypes... to be continued

Being in Thailand's expat community has given me TONS of oportunities to stereotype nationalities which as my friends know, is something that I LOVE doing!! Here's what I have so far:

South Africans: charming, charming, charming!!! All the South Africans that I've met were all SUPER well-spoken, attractive, funny, outgoing and overall wonderful! I need to visit this place

Irish: I've only met four people from Ireland so far but I won't count the senile old woman when making my assesment. The other three are literally the best story tellers that I've EVER MET!

Scottish: When I figure out how to understand their accent I'll let you know. :)

Australians: The Aussies somehow seem to be the most similar to the Americans (except obviously much SMARTER)

MEN: Sluts. I just found out that the majority of the western guys that I've met have been getting prostitutes and "special massages." Which, by the way, apparently costs $77. USD for the "very best services Thailand has to offer" and "involves things that no white girl is capable of." WTF

Disco!

I went to my first DISCO last night!! As soon as we walked up a club employee started taking pictures of us which I was told will probably end up on the internet to promote the club as "cool enough for Farangs." Anyways, there were several things that I was really surprised about:
- the place had air conditioning!!
- the music was good! There was a live band full of teenagers with crazy eighties haircuts and they were GREAT! All the other Thai music that I've heard sounds a lot like christian music; really, really droney and sung by people that aren't good enough to be in a real band.
- Apparently there aren't dance floors in Thai clubs. The area that should be the dance floor has tons of small, tall tables that everyone uses for their drinks. Everyone just dances around their table. It's really weird and so far, I don't think I'm going to like it.
- most people buy a whole bottle of hard-a and share it at their little table. And when you leave, you're allowed to take the bottle with you. It was really funny seeing teenagers walk out of the club with their bottles of vodka.
- I actually saw some attractive Thai guys!! Ever since getting to Thailand I've noticed that there are lots of beautiful Thai girls and NO cute guys. Finally last night I saw some decent guys and even some taller than 5'4"!!

GROSS!

April 23rd, 2009
For dinner we went to a place with with a salad bar and THANK BUDDAH that we didn't order it!!! We saw a Thai girl pick through the lettuce with her hands for literally 3 or 4 minutes. She picked up almost every single piece and looked it over (sometimes smelling it) then she'd put it back and pick up a new piece. I wish I had my camera! She did the same thing with the cherry tomatoes and the cucumbers. GROSSSSS!!!!! Her boyfriend and her noticed that we were all stairing at them but she kept doing it. Sooooooo, I guess I'll never be eating at a buffet EVER AGAIN!!

The worst part about this is that I'm SURE her hands weren't anywhere near clean. Most public restrooms in malls/restaurants/schools do NOT have soap in them and even when they do, the majority of people walk right out of their stall and out the door. WHY?!?!??!?!??!?!?!?!?!?

Brandon's "haircut"

April 19th, 2009
Josh is cutting Brandon's hair right now and I fucking hate them BOTH!!!
Brandon grew his hair out for two or three months for me as a birthday present and it looked SO GOOD. But now....

Bad (but hilarious) day

Today was the first really hard day. First off, we had to wake up at 4am for our flight to Phuket. Did I mention that my birthday was yesterday?!?! Thanks to my dear friends I was the most hung over I've ever been in my life. I really, really don't recommend taking a thai taxi while nauseous. It's 100% miraclele that I didn't throw up. So anyway, we arrived at our Phuket hotel that was arranged for us by TEFL International around 10am. oh dear 6 pound/eight ounce baby jesus..... I didn't think I was a prood but apparently I totally am. There were bugs EVERYWHERE. Our shower was a hose that literally just trickled. We did have "air conditioning" but it broke the second time we turned it on. Anyways, LONG story short, we totally left and found a nice hotel. One room at the fancy place we found cost the same as two rooms as the bug place so we decided to just share one room with two TWIN beds. I guess we're about to become REALLY good friends!!! So later in the afternoon we went exploring and ran into another guy taking the TEFL course - Mike. He's from Florida but he still seems pretty chill. He took us to a place that rents nice motorbikes for 3000 baht ($85. usd) per month. Brandon and Josh were so excited and they both paid the money and jumped on bikes right away. I was totally freaked out - Brandon kept telling me I was acting like his mom cuz I thought this was a bad idea. Thai people are f'ing CRAZY drivers and I couldn't imagin being on a tiny bike going 50mph, on the wrong side of the road with all those ten year old (literally) drivers. Nelly and I told the guys to go practice with the bikes and get used to driving on the left-side before we got on the back. As soon as Brandon took off he imediately started driving down the right side of the road and we had to scream after him - "LEFT SIDE!!!" Meanwhile, Josh took off and after eight feet he ran straight into a metal gate and dumped the bike on top of himself. Oh my god. So, long story short, Josh has a huge, deep scrape on this knee and his toe and then some other smaller scrapes on his hands and arm. Brandon had to STEAL some bandages from a hospital while Josh was driven home by Mike. Then on the LONG walk home I got eight ENOURMOUS mosquito bites. It was such a shitty day.

This looked much worse in real life...


Am I going to be scared for life?!?!? Even though I use every drop of will power that I have to stop from scratching my legs during the day, I still wake up scrathing in the middle of the night...

April 17th, 2009 Birthday!

________________

MY BIRTHDAY!!! I had such a great day! We went to the Grand Palace which was completely incredible. The palace was built in the mid 1700's and it's breathtaking! It's a travesty that we couldn't stay very long. I was pretty sure the heat was going to kill me. I don't know what the temperature was but it was without a doubt the hottest heat any of us have ever experienced. I kept feeling dizzy even though I drank tons of water. Scary.

And bad news - we got scammed by a fucking taxi driver!! I thought we were smarter than them but apparently not. So, the taxi on the way to the grand palace dropped us off at the side of the grand palace near what must have been a staff entrance or something. When we got out of the taxi a man in a uniform (which turned out to be a fake uniform) told us that the Grand Palace doesn't open until 12:00 which was in one hour. A nearby tuktuk driver (they're f'ing everywhere!!) asked us if we'd like to be taken to a wat (temple) that's only a few kilometers away. He said that he'd take us for free if we "made one five minute stop at my sponsor's." We agreed because we thought the palace was still closed. As soon as he dropped us off at the wat we knew there was something wrong. The wat's tour guide was another tuk/tuk driver!!! He gave us the lamest tour and than started talking about how we should visit a nice jewelry shop nearby to buy gifts. He even wrote down the name of the place on our map. AHHHHH!!!!!! It was so frustrating! So then, after the lame "tour".......... surprise!!! We were dropped off at that stupid jewelry shop so that our tuktuk driver could get his gas card. After we pretended to look around we were taken back to the Grand Palace's main entrance and GUESS WHAT... it had been open the whole time. We were completely lied to about it being closed until noon. Unbelievable.

In the evening we we went to Khan San Road which is also called the Backpackers' Ghetto. It's wild!! There are tons of outdoor bars and noodle stands. It has a Vegas feel; everyone is drunk and walking around with drinks. Just like Vegas, there's also TONS of pimps and guys asking if you want to see a "ping-pong show." For my birthday, Josh and Brandon bought Nelly and I shots. The first one (which I think was a double) was a Thai Vodka that was 160 proof!!!! Do they have anything that high back home?!?! And by the way, it was 100 baht ($3.00) for two double shots!! Needless to say, Nelly and I ended up getting TRASHED that night!!

April 16th, 2009 SIAM PARK!

Siam Park looks exactly like a run down six flags. They have four semi-big roller coasters and it's also a water park with some HUGE slides and an enormous wave pool. Swimming was SO fun but the boys got pretty bad sunburns (hahahahaaa). The rides were cool too; they weren't as big as the ones that we're used to but they're more terrifying because we were positive that something was going to break and we were all going to DIE! WHooo hoooo!

100 baht, two stops!

Taxis - f'ing taxies. It's completely true what they say; Bangkok taxi/tuktuk drivers are the scum of the universe. Here's the deal: the taxis/tuktuks target tourists because they can get away with charging them five times what they'd charge a local person. Even worse, the metered taxies will take the looooong way so that they can make extra $$. Once, when we weren't paying attention we let a taxi driver take us an extra 30 minutes out of the way.

The most annoying thing is that Taxis and tuktuks will pick you up and tell you that they'll give you a good deal and only charge you 200 baht ($6.00) or so to take you three miles to the market if you "make one stop" to see their "sponsor." What's happening is they trick tourists (but only white tourists) into going to taylor shops and jewelry shops on the way to their destination so that they can get gasoline certificates from the shop owners. The drivers get the certificates even if we don't buy anything (which we never do) but it's still annoying to pretend that you're interested in their old-woman jewelry or fake armani suites. I can't believe anyone EVER buys anything from those places but they must because they're hundreds of these places!! ANYWAY, so after we figured out the scam we started negotiating for free taxi/tuktuk rides if we agreed to "make one stop." Josh even got a tuktuk driver to pay us 5 Baht to give us a ride home if we stopped at a stupid taylor!! We were so proud of him!

Arriving in BKK and the Water Festival

April 13, 2009

Peace out Portland; Sawatdee Ka Bangkok!! WE MADE IT! And this is definitely the coolest thing I've ever done!!

So, our 29ish hour journey to BKK started on a three hour train to Seattle (Josh figured out that it's $300. cheaper to fly out of SeaTac rather than PDX and the train tickets were only $29./each). The train ride ended up being really fun especially when we got off and three cop cars surrounded us cuz they thought Brandon was a crime suspect or something! HA!!!!



So then, Josh's great friend Matt took us to the airport where we had to wait around for 3 or 4 hours. Right at this point it felt like we were already in another county. Since we were taking EVA Airlines (which I think it Taiwanese) all the announcements and signs were in Chinese and besides a couple 50 year old creepers (with their 25 year old asian wives), we were the only whities. I think it's so funny how much Josh's blonde hair stands out!!! Oh - and the plane itself was SO COOL!! It was a Boeing 777 so it was enormous!! I think there were about 20 flight attendants.

The flight went surprisingly well. I ended up being really happy that I didn't make special brownies because I slept for 7 out of the 13 hours without taking anything!! And I'm glad I didn't sleep more cuz I would have missed the food!!! ...I'm such an ADPi!! The trays of food were hilarious. They were neon green plastic and absolutely TINY!! They looked exactly like something a five year old would want for serving her easy-bake oven stuff. The water cup was literally about 1/8 cup which you can imagine made Brandon pretty distressed! HAHA!!! But, my tiny food was SO GOOD! Shockingly, they had a vegetarian option but I can't say what it was because I didn't recognize anything except the rice and tofu. I had never seen any of the vegetables before which was SO COOL!

After 13 hours on the plane we landed in Taipei which seemed like a really, really nice airport. Our layover was only three hours long so we unfortunately didn't have enough time to leave the airport. But at least we found a free internet room so we could e-mail home and UPDATE OUR FACEBOOK STATUSES!! ;)

So meanwhile, I was sitting at our gate and watching four (then later six) mormons corner (ok, not really corner) a tiny Thai lady. After listening to them, I'm pretty sure missionary work is exactly like sales. There was a raport building stage, a pitch, a close, a hard close... it would have been really funny except the last thing that this world needs is less Buddhists and more mormons. Well, at least they weren't evangelicals! i might have had to tell the TSA guys that I heard them use the word Ji Had or something.

Ooooo and speaking of mormons, I almost finished reading the second Twilight book which is AWESOME!! :) .....I know, embaressing... but they're so good! Although, I really started wondering how Edward can stop himself from killing Bella when she's on her period especially when Jasper almost killed her when she got a tiny paper cut on her birthday. Hmm

Anyway, we finally landed in BKK and holy cow it's f'ing HOTTTTT! Getting a taxi was really frustrating because we could clearly tell that we were being taken advantage of because we're farangs (foreigners). But the taxi assigner lady wouldn't negotiate with us AT ALL because there were tons of other customers that seemed to be paying exactly what she said. We did find one taxi for 700 baht (the first place said 1,200) but it turned out later that we should have only paid 350 baht. As Brandon and Josh kept saying; we were GROSSED!!

So, 29 hours after we started our trip we got to our hotel: All Seasons Siam which was recommended by Laty - thanks man!! It's better than anywhere I've stayed back home (not that that's saying a lot) and really inexpensive. I immediately took a shower (I called dibs on first shower about 20 hours ago) which was amazing - best water pressure everrrrr! It's seriously better than the sorority's down stairs shower! It felt like I was standing under a pounding waterfall. I'm pretty sure I'm going to single handily cause a BKK water shortage!!!

Speaking of water, we arrived during the Thai new year which means WATER FESTIVAL!!! I expected that this was going to be really fun but as it turned out - not so much. EVERYWHERE you go, people spray you with hoses, dump buckets of water on your head and spray you with supersoakers. And this isn't nice, refreshing water. This is NASTYYY, hot, STINKY water. We're pretty sure we all have AIDS now. The warnings tuned out to be totally true; farangs are targeted BIG TIME at the water festival. We were getting chased! :)