Hey Lazyass, what does your apartment look like?

Well, it looks like this:

The living room.  Don't worry, Mom and Dad.  That's not my booze at all.  Allegedly, mine was in a bag elsewhere, but nothing can be proved.  Interestingly, do you all see the bad around the neck of the whiskey bottle?  That's a to go glass of sprite.  I'm not making this up.

The bedroom, I've since put on my own sheets and my mattress pad.  It's improved the look and sleepability greatly.

My kitchen, which is in a separate building.

My scooter.  I have named her Pepper Pots, because the front looks like Ironman.  I doubt I'll kill myself on it, so don't worry too much!

Facebook Reminded Me

I was chatting with a friend on Facebook, and I realized that I didn't ever post the pictures from Day 2 of Songkran.  Kat and I went to the beach, because they only celebrate one day in Chumphon town.

Yes, that is an elephant on the beach.  They happen randomly around here.  The people that own the elephant sell sugar cane that you can feed it.  I love elephants.

Welcome to the Jungle, Baby!

Golly, it sure has been a long time, hasn't it.  Yup, sure has.  I had to go to Bangkok for the seminar from AYC (for those of you who don't know, it's the agency I'm working with), and then rather then sending us all on to our schools, they asked us to stay in Bangkok.  I'll get to all that later.  I have zero pictures from the seminar, because it was really really boring during the day, and really beer fueled at night.  The swimming pool was surrounded by farong drinking massive beers every single night.  Sometimes they kicked us out and we'd all move as a pack to the front steps of the hotel.  I tried to drink with different groups every night, but there's always some overlap, and I was generally flitting from place to place till I found one group and stuck there.  For the most part, I tried to avoid the Thai wife crew (specific breed of guy who didn't have mojo in their own country, so they came here cause Thai women love foreigners for various reasons).  This isn't to say that every guy who has a Thai wife/girlfriend is a scumbag, but there's a lot of them.  I have stories, but they're long and silly and I don't want to give you guys a poor view of people who come to Asia.  We're not all looking to hook up with a Thai person, you know.

Anyway, after the seminar we were turned loose in Bangkok, and most of us ended up on Kao Sarn road.  What is Khao San road, you ask?  This is Khao San road.

My golly that's a lot of people, what are they all doing?

That is what they are doing.  Kids, do not try this at home.  Buckets are an evil creation of Thai people.  They contain Sangsom (thai blended spirits, we farong usually refer to this abomination as whiskey), Thai Red Bull and Pepsi.  They are delicious and evil.  Evilly delicious, I suppose you could say.  You drink them with the friends you came with (if you havn't lost track of them already) or new friends that you make.  Your new friends will speak varying degrees of English (due to buckets or being from a country that doesn't have English as their first language.  It's all very exciting.

Now, I know that some of you have probably cottoned on to the fact that you haven't seen any pictures of me here.  How tan have I gotten?  Well, let's compare....

Whoooo.  No wonder they call us ghost people.  This picture was taken my second night in Thailand.  The guy is Hiroki, a really nice guy from Japan.  It was his first time out of his country, and he didn't live in a big city.  He tried to talk to somebody from a different country every night.  That night he got me and a Finnish guy named Miki who I don't have a picture of for some reason. 

This was taken towards the end of the seminar.  That's Sean, who may or may not still be in Thailand.  He broke with AYC on the last day because they wanted to place him up north.  I really ought to send him an email.  By the way, I wear SPF 50 sunblock.  Yup.  I'm freaking dark.

Anyway, some more people:

That's Allison, my roomie from the seminar.  She's a lot of fun, from California.  She's posted up north now, because she really wants to learn Thai, so she opted for a tiny village where people don't really speak English.  I don't really recall this picture being taken, I think she handed off the camera and then grabbed me with no warning.

That's a really good friend of Kat's, Kevin.  I found it ironic that we have been less than an hour apart down south, have a common friend, and met by happenstance on Khao San road.  Wild.  He'd just gotten back from China, so I hung out with him and his brother for a bit.

From left to right, that's Sally, I think Mark though I don't recall exactly, Tom and Lewis.  All from the UK.  Sally and Lewis are a couple who got stationed at the same school as Kat, so we can all continue to hang out together.  They're just lovely.  Tom is in Chanthaburi.

So, there you have my exciting three days on Khao San.  The big issue with Khao San is that it's expensive.  The next biggest issue is that of all the places in Thailand, it's probably the least safe.  Anywhere farong gather, the people who will rob from the farong also gather.  Not to mention the foreigners behaving like assholes.  Guys will grab your arm and try to drag you into the bar or club with them, you're constantly being harassed by people who want money or free beer.  So I bailed.  And went to stay here

Pretty, no?  It's still technically in Bangkok.  Bangkok is a really really big city, I think this was on the outskirts.  Don't ask me any other geographical information, I just know it was a 200 baht cab ride.  The inhabitants of the house were these guys

Well, and another guy who doesn't join in shenanigans like these.  Those two might have had a bit too much whiskey and were showing some Thai girls their sweet dance moves.  All three guys were South African, and they had another South African crashing with them while he waited for his school assignment in Sri Ratcha.

This is Pieter playing pictionary.  He was the one that wasn't spinning around on the floor.

This is the pictionary drawing for everybody give Pieter the middle finger.

This is everybody giving Pieter the middle finger.  Don't ask, it was a theme for the night.  Standing up is Ryno, looking confused and actually flipping me off is Jaime (we all called him Germ cause his name actually sounds a lot like that), Pieter flipping everybody off, and Christiaan sitting with his back to us playing with his phone.

There's a better picture of Christiaan and his girlfriend, Kung.

This is Kung showing us what a pig's face looks like.  With the rules for Kings behind her.  Ahhh, fun times.

The last night I was there, Kung's mother and friends came over and they cooked a huge dinner.  To be polite, you kind of eat whatever they hand you.  Which is how it came to be that I ate a raw prawn.  I guess that's something they do in Isan.  the clean and shell a prawn, put it in a piece of cabbage with some incredibly spicy sauce on it, and pop the whole thing in their mouth.  Then they moved to half cooked prawns.  Blech.  I hate prawns.  I've had fish here that I actually like, being that it's really freshly caught.  But shrimp and squid are still my mortal enemies.  Yeeeugh.

So, those were my Bangkok adventures.  I've got an apartment now, and a scooter.  I should probably be unpacking and making it look less like a tornado went through.