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Thailand-more of a diary entry than blog post. . .

Personal diary:

1 week in Bangkok:
-Spent some great time with the Boehms. Good to see other people with 4 kids in an Asian country.

-Day at a water park. Turns out water slides without any concern for safety in the design and no lifeguards watching over the madness can get pretty hairy. Sliding down a straight shot with the little waves turns into an adventure when you are going so fast that you get airborne and just about jump tracks into the next lane. It also turns out this can hurt a little bit. (Side note for all the middle school boys reading this blog: People going really fast when they slide into the water don’t always have all their swimwear in the right places when they come out of the water. Dee could tell you all about that). They also had the tube water ride where you slide down the big cylinder on inner tubes through twists and turns. Now take away the inner tubes. You have everybody running and jumping into the cylinder head first, upside down, etc. . . . You get the idea. Lunacy. My shoulder blades were sore for a week.

-Day at the Rose garden. Good day enjoying Thai culture. Bamboo dancing, rice grinding, flower pedal bouquet making, sword fighting, pottery spinning, hand fan painting, coconut grinding, snake wearing, fish feeding, pad Thai eating, and banana leaf fish weaving.

-2 days at Buddhist temples. The Thai people are crazy about their Buddha idols. Big ones, small ones, gold ones, emerald ones, black ones. You get the picture. Buddhas everywhere. My mom just wanted a nativity scene. Turns out those are tougher to come by in Thailand. Thought about stealing it from the hotel (only one we saw), but thought that defeated the whole idea of the nativity.

-Bangkok transportation: Water taxi. Tuk Tuk . Train, taxi, and lots of walking. Death never seemed too far away. . . 6 people riding in the back of a 3 wheel scooter is a bit dangerous on the streets of Bangkok. We got all 3 wheels off the ground at different times in our 15 minute trip. The water taxi was brilliant. I wish GR had one of these. I would take it from GR to Holland every day.

-Bangkok malls: Lots of square feet. Lots of stores, lots of eateries, and tons and tons of people. They just got their first Crispy Crème 6 months ago. There was a line 50 deep out the door. They looked like mice working their way through the line to get their cocaine drip. Much the same as my kids standing in line at McDonalds to get their Oreo mcflurry. Also ate Christmas dinner at the outback in this mall. Not real Christmassy, but after being in china for 6 months, nothing said merry Christmas better than a quality blooming onion. We spent a weeks’ salary on that meal, but it was oh so tasty.

-Saw Monitor lizards in the park. One of them got its jaws around a chicken bone laying in the gutter. It swallowed that thing whole. It was impressive to watch. We saw another one stalking a water snake on the shore of the pond, but it was too late for us to see a super sweet monitor attack.

-lost my cell phone in a taxi. (Had to pay the $100 stupid tax in order to get a new phone back in Changchun)

-Went to church twice. Great services. Of course we met people from Calvin at the service who were just visiting. They had just walked through my cousin’s house in GR because they were thinking about buying it. The world is a small place.

-The Prince Palace hotel. All can you eat breakfast every morning with western food. We devoured that stuff. Caleb set the record with 15 pieces of French toast one morning, but I probably set the hotel record of eating 5000 calories in one sitting. They had cornflakes with real milk and real sugar. Croissants. Fried eggs. Boiled eggs. . . Parting is such sweet sorrow.

Phuket
-Ghetto hotel. We saved money on our hotel so we could blow it on adventure stuff. But the hotel came with two rooms and access to a pool. Turns out access to a pool is the equivalent of saying someone has access to a movie theater. You can get there, but you can’t afford the cost of entry. We had access to a pool for only $60 a day. That was how much we spent on the entire room.

-Swimming in the ocean. It’s hard to complain when its 85 degrees outside and the water temperature is 70. We spent a lot of time floating in the waves.

-Hiking to the big Buddha. Phuket has a 50 meter tall Buddha on the top of a little mountain. We thought we would hike there even though all the locals said you couldn’t. We ended up finding a road (thanks to Jonathan) that led to a path that led to a trail that led to the big Buddha. It ended up being an 8 hour hike to see something no one really wanted to see and we were never sure if we would actually find a way there, but it was a great time. On the way back to our hotel, we hiked through the Hilton on phuket. Turns out this is where the other half stay at 400 clams a night. I tried to convince Dee that they would never notice if we swam in one of their 3 pools, but she thought it would be a bad idea to teach our kids how to break rules instead of letting them discover that joy all on their own. Not sure I agree with her on that one, but she won the argument.

-Canoe riding around remote islands. Limestone islands eroded with time causing large lagoon ponds in the middle of the island accessible by little caves formed by erosion. Pretty cool.

-Snuba diving. Like scuba diving but without the 3 day PADI training. The O2 tank sits on a little raft and you get 25 feet of air hose to run with. Only Nathan and Emily did it while the rest of us went snorkeling. Nathan took to it like a fish in water. If given the chance, he would still be out there. He might have found his future career. Spent the afternoon at a beautiful beach and more snorkeling (saw some crazy sea creatures, but nothing that would bite us)

-New Years eve. What happens when a bunch of loaded Eastern European tourists show up in Thailand with a ton of disposable income and the local population is selling skidloads of fireworks for almost nothing? You get NewYears eve 2010 for the stouts. Now I’ve never been in a war, but jiminy. It got so loud that Dee and I thought we should check it out in the streets. Not sure how wise this was. Every tom dick and harry (or Petr, ivan, and demtri) were lighting off bricks of whatever in the middle of our very narrow alley. We mostly spent our 15 minutes outside trying not to die. At one point, we decided that we should check on the kids so ‘we’ ran back into the hotel. I had to say ‘we’ because my wife decided to bravely hide in little alcove while her husband ran through the street dodging mortars and land mines. She decided it would be safer to stay put (and let our children suffer alone. . .) The worst part is I have been told that Chinese new year (first week of feb) is waaay crazier. Hard to imagine.

-Ate dinner at a different restaurant every day and never left our little alley where our hotel was. Thai, Indian, Italian, and Mexican. They were all pretty tasty.

-Rode on a couple elephants. Emily and Nathan got to ride on the heads and ‘drive’ the elephants. Pretty cool. Those suckers are just big and they can pee a river when they gotta go.

-Went to the aquarium. Saw some cool fish inside. Then walked the boardwalk and saw some cool fish in the water. The turtle hatchery was pretty sweet.

-For dessert, there was a guy on the corner who sold fresh fruit shakes and banana pancakes (crepe fried on a hot plate with about a cup of butter. Bananas put in the middle and then folded up and grilled on both sides. After it’s off the grill, it is smeared with Nutella. Not so healthy, but yummy enough for us to have several. Every day.)

-Thai message. Dee and I got a message at our hotel in Bangkok by the pool and we thought we should get one more on our last night in Phuket. This was an important life lesson for Jeff. If you’re getting a Thai message at $7 for an hour and a woman who looks like she used to be a man takes you upstairs and asks you to take your skivvies off, you might want to just consider the $7 a loss and get out of there. Me, I kept my skivvies on, but I was going to get my $7 Thai message even if she/he was going to work me over in the process. The Dutch blood runs thick in my veins.

-Flight back to Changchun. Left the hotel at 11 pm. Got to the airport at 12. Got on the plane at 2 am. Arrived back at our house at 1 pm. We were all pretty ornery and tired by the time we got home, but bed never felt so good (after our ‘king’ size bed in phuket turned out to be 2 twins pushed together which forced one of us to ‘sleep in the crack’ every night)

The end.