Evening arrival in Thailand

We loaded our plane at 2pm and it was the most beautiful, enjoyable flight I have ever had. It was about a 9 hour flight and we got two awesome meals that were amazing, delicious, authentic Thai meals. Yep airplane food! Plus we each had our own TVs and unlimited drinks. Soda, cocktails, wine, beer, juice… you name it- anything you can think of! Of course I couldn’t take full advantage of this because of my bladder that seems to not like liquid that much. I just typed my blog in Microsoft Word for a while, read my book, tried watching a movie but got pretty bored of that, and… that’s it. I think I slept for a total of 40 minutes.

Although it was still really nice and the service was great I broke some rules so they had to do their job and take everything away from me. Since I never travelled with just a bag on the plane with me and I always had luggage under the plane I got a lot of my stuff thrown out. My contact solution- gone, Victoria Secret spray- garbage, brand new lotion with sunscreen in it brought all the way from the states- done, half a tube of tooth paste- garbage and… whatever else they decided was too much liquid.

Although it was sad to let some of that go, it ended up being so funny because the guy taking it away from me was laughing at us too. It was even funnier because we thought we may as well get the last use out of it before it all goes in the garbage. Everybody in the line behind us loaded up lotion and body spray and the workers were just laughing at us. After that scene I had to be on a mission to get contact solution since they took that away from me too, but that was an easy task. When we landed in Bangkok we got a transfer to our next flight that was about an hour long to Phuket where we would then meet Alex and Mark.

When we landed in Phuket we saw my name on a piece of paper from our shuttle driver that drove us to our resort. His English was definitely an area of opportunity and so we pretty much didn’t talk to him the whole time. There was a girl about our age I’d guess that was curled up on the front seat sleeping. It was about a 40 minute drive from the airport to our hotel. We arrived around 12:15am and Alex and Mark were already there so I was really excited to see them. The shuttle driver tried to charge us 10,800 baht which is around $340 (ish) Australian dollars and he said it was just for the ride from the airport to the resort. He had no idea what we were saying and we found out later that he said it was just for the shuttle ride but he actually meant to say that it was for the shuttle and the 4 day stay at the hotel. So while I was talking to the front desk he drove off and was really sad that we didn’t pay him. It was really hard to communicate with him because he kept saying the money was just for the shuttle and we didn’t like that answer. Anyway, long story short, for the first 2 days we thought we had a free stay and shuttle since he drove off but then the travel agency got a hold of us in our room a few days later and collected their money. The first day gave us all a really good idea of how unorganized Thailand is with everything. Absolutely every single thing is totally unorganized but somehow, someway, it all works out. As my sister Amy would say it is “dysfunctionally functional”. Not only does it work out but it seems to all work out alright!

So we got showed to our room with great service (even though they had no money from us yet) and we got breakfast tickets and all that fun stuff and then the boys asked us how long it would take us to get ready. Of course we are three girls that have been traveling all day long so we said. . . TEN MINUTES! (tricked ya, didn’t I) And so we just changed and put on clothes for warm weather because it was probably 90 degrees even though it had been dark for hours. After we changed we went on a little tour of our town that we were going to be staying at for the next few days. Pretty much it was a crazy mad house all over the streets and a lot of markets and people selling everything you need ever. The main area was about a 5-8 minute walk but it was craziness even not on the main street. While we were walking Alex said that our hotel was actually pretty far from the main part of town and I had no idea what he was talking about until we walked for another 2 minutes and I saw it myself! Although it was crazy all the way there, the main street that Alex was taking us to was 50,23975, .234 times more crazy then the walk there. It was wild, and I am not even going to try and go into details about it. Just know it was crazier than anything I have ever seen. Vegas on steroids doesn't even come close to describe this. There are no comparisons that would even come close unless you experienced it yourself.

(pictures give absolutely no justice! But that's Alex anyway)-->
Also... This blog is rated G, therefore this picture is also rated G. However, Thailand does not know what rated G is.
So we got to the main street and decided to stop and have a drink at the Moon Bar, nobody else was in there so it was nice to all just hang out for a while and enjoy each other’s company over a long island ice tea. All the bars here are outside but they have a roof still. So even though we were at the Moon Bar we were still on the street and there were other bars all around us that we could see. It was especially fun to people watch here because there are so many people just doing their own thing and it is just craziness all the way around you no matter what way you look.

<-- (Shorty wasn't drunk he just wasn't ready for the pictue, hahaha. . . tooooo bad!) Our bar tender was a very nice guy and the people here are amazing!! You probably would not have guessed that the Thai people are so nice but they really are. I have never seen so many smiles and nice people all jam packed into one country. Every Thai person we met was just so nice and it was not really expected. So we just hung out with our bar tender and all caught up for a while until we decided that we needed to see more of this street. We paid the bar tender and then they came after us because we didn’t leave enough money on accident and it was totally our fault, actually it was all Jourdan’s fault but we all took the blame and apologized and left with smiles on our faces. After about 1 minute of walking the workers at the Moon Bar chased after us because we accidently gave them too much money the second time and paid extra on accident. This was just totally unexpected because if that happened in a lot of other places you would never see them chasing after you for over paying. This guy chased us down and yelled for us until we heard him just to give us some money back. I just thought that was so amazing because you definitely do not see that act everywhere. This is just one example of how nice the Thai people were. After we left the Moon bar we pretty much just explored the streets and our town. We bought a beer from a street vendor and talked him down. Everything you buy here you barging on and they always go down. The price they offer you is just pretty much a recommendation. This is something that I am not very good at. The price they give you they really never expect to get that much for it. Since most of their English is not that good they just type in price in the calculator and then they hand the calculater to you and ask you to put in your price. We got told by many people to always start off with a little under half or about half of the price they tell you. They always go down from their beginning price and they are still so happy that you bought from them, they are all really desperate to sell anything they have. Just for a better idea on how cheap it is here, shirts are between 100-200 Baht which is about $3-6 dollars. Dresses are about $6, our resort hotel was 10,800 baht for 4 days and this is about $340 but split 3 ways. You can bargon on anything, we got our car rental for cheaper which we all paid about 6 bucks a day for. I am not very good at it but I had a lot of people around me that helped me get a little better. While wondering the streets Jourdan ran into the club that she really wanted to go in and so we just all just followed her in. We bargoned our price in and got it cheaper and they let us all in for like 10 dollars for 5 of us. We stayed here for maybe an hour or something and then we wanted to leave. While we were walking home we decided that we should just go swimming because it was so hot out and we were all sweaty from the humid and the ocean was right there so why not?! We went swimming in the ocean for a while and then just hung out on the beach for the rest of the night until we were ready for bed.

. We walked back to our place and then Alex and Mark went back to their beach which was one beach over on Karon beach. Our beach was called Patong and that is the main part of Phuket. Once we got home we showered and were fast asleep but we all had a great first night and were excited that we had so much fun and still had not been in Phuket for 24 hours.