Thai-tle

12/19/09: Bangkok, Thailand

How many modes of transportation does it take to get from the Bangkok bus station to your hostel?

1. Local bus to Khao San Road, because that’s the only place we could get anyone to explain to us how to get to. Heck, we couldn’t even figure out which bus station we were dropped off at – did you know Bangkok has at least three bus stations? I know, it seems like overkill to me too!
2. Another local bus, which would take us to a stop near our hostel – but wait, this is the express! The express doesn’t go to our hostel stop! Uh-oh, better get off. In the confusion, we may have forgotten to pay our fare. Please don’t report us.
3. Tuk-tuk to the nearest BTS (monorail) station. Because we have directions from there. No, really, we do.
4. BTS to our station, which was the last stop. At least there can be no confusion there.
5. Our own four legs (two legs each) for the last 12 minutes to our hostel. Surprisingly, we don’t get lost.

It's a good thing you can't see our faces in this picture, because we are NOT amused.

Three hours after our bus arrived in Bangkok, we finally checked into our hostel. I know we graduated college two years ago, but sometimes it doesn’t seem like we really should have been able to. There needs to be some sort of practical exam before they let you go roaming around the world like this.

But the good thing about a day that starts like that is that it can only get better – which it did. After a mid-morning nap, we had lunch at the Emporium food court, and I could go on and on about how amazing food courts outside of the U.S. are, but I won’t. People, just remember: if you go to Southeast Asia, make sure you eat at the food courts. It’s delicious.

We then spent the afternoon wandering around the famous Chatuchak Weekend Market. It’s a giant area of endless stalls filled with clothes, paintings, furniture, housewares, puppies, you name it. And take it from someone who loves to shop – it was overwhelming. The inner walkways were really narrow and filled with people, and we spent the first half without a map, which made it impossible to navigate. I had a few moments of panic when all we could see were rows and endless rows of more stalls and I thought we might die in a mountain of clothing and knickknacks and coin purses with tiny elephants on them. But we just followed a faint ray of sunshine and eventually ended up out on a main road. We didn’t buy very many things, but if I had a lot of money and a big suitcase, I would have happily spent another day there filling it up.
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Thought of the Day: Thai iced tea is Thai! I don’t know how I forgot that.
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Picture of the Day: I’m pretty sure all of Bangkok was at the market with us. See?

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Revenge on Monkey Island

12/18/09: Phi Phi Islands, Thailand

[Editor’s Note: In honor of our visit to the filming location of perhaps the best tropical Leonardo Dicaprio movie ever made (The Beach), this post will turn our pictures into an action movie that had nothing to do with what actually happened today.]

Two newlyweds, Evan and Flo, arrived at the Phi Phi Islands for a relaxing honeymoon away from the stress of their unemployed lives living at home with their parents in America. Mom and Dad, they should have taken your advice and stayed at home.

After dinner on their first night, Flo displayed her love for Evan by whittling a heart into her watermelon dessert.

Don't play with your food!

The two were so in love that they already had plans to have children and form a family band to tour the countryside. They woke up the following morning and went snorkeling (Evan, after watching Along Came Polly ten too many times, wouldn’t take a chance by scuba diving.)

She looks like a pro.

After enjoying the beautiful coral and fish, Evan couldn’t find his beloved wife.

At least the fish were beautiful.

He searched high and low, even though really there was nowhere high to go, so that half of the search was a waste of time. But no Flo.

See? No Flo, just magnificent rocks.

After mourning until the morning, he received a note in the mail. (Plot hole: how did he get mail on a tropical island?) Flo had been captured by monkeys and was being held on 10,000 bananas ransom.

The monkeys were very demanding.

Unfortunately Evan did not have 10,000 bananas, although he had recently learned to enjoy chocolate banana fruit shakes. There had to be another way to get Flo back. He found 10,000 bananas laying around and used them to rent a speedboat to get to Monkey Island.

Quite an expensive speedboat rental.

He sneaked past the monkey guards and climbed to the highest point he could find.

Our hero, looking for Flo and contemplating what to have for lunch.

After thirty minutes of scanning the island, he saw Flo just below the rock on which he was perched!

She's always in the last place you look.

Nuts, it turned out to be a monkey that looked like Flo. The monkey quickly cartwheeled away.

Don't you hate it when that happens?

Evan decided that in order to rescue his wife, he’d have to search every square foot of Monkey Island. Fortunately the island itself wasn’t all that big.

Look at the ominous/cool clouds above. The monkeys sometimes hid in the clouds.

After ten days of searching (this is the part of the movie where the director would take liberty as to all the trouble Evan got into), Evan finally found Flo squeezed under a rock.

The monkeys wedged her in there good.

He was so happy to see her alive, but he still had one final obstacle standing in the way of the two of them.

There were actually a bunch of these in the rocks, but we didn't notice them until after we took all the pictures.

He felt so unprepared for the task, but then he remembered the flute he kept in his back pocket. Evan quickly charmed the snake to sleep, then snuck Flo to where he docked his speedboat. Before getting her to safety though, he held Flo in a long, made-for-television embrace. (A movie with this plot would never make it in the theaters. Well, Mars Attacks did, so I suppose anything stands a chance.)

Reunited again before the final plot twist.

It those twelve minutes of hugging, the King Monkey hopped down from the clouds and landed on Flo’s head!

I know this picture was from yesterday, but it fit so well in this story I had to use it.

Evan panicked and began flinging feces at the animal. (Whose feces? We’ll never know.) Then he realized he was bigger than K.M., so he grabbed it by the tail and used his Gold Medal experience in the hammer throw to hurl K.M. far far away. The two newlyweds then motored back to safety.

Who's driving the boat??

That night, they threw a huge party with all their friends. The end.

What an awesome movie! Spielberg, how did I do?

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Puzzles for Postcards

Where Am I? Name the city.

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Thought of the Day: After the trip, I’m not only going to direct an Oscar-winning movie, but also write a New York Times bestseller.
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Picture of the Day: I wanted to fit this picture of a menacing shadow into the plot somehow, but it wound up on the cutting room floor.

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Thaisland

[Editor’s note: This is the second post in our temporary “Two for Tuesdays” campaign to catch our blog up to near real-time.]

12/16/09 – 12/17/09: Patong Bay, Thailand

Are you tired of my post-title puns yet? Because there’s more coming, don’t you worry. What with all the lying on the beach and drinking fresh fruit shakes and getting massages for $6 – well, there’s a lot of time in all that to think of puns using “Thai.”

I actually have a lot to say about Patong, but I have spent a few minutes trying to organize my thoughts and can’t think of any good way to really do it, so I’m going to have to go with a list (yes, it’s lazy, but it’s late and we have to get up early to go snorkeling – I know, tough life we lead).

• We got here on the first day of “Patong Carnival 2009” which means we have eaten all but one of our meals at the Carnival food stalls along the beach. This is good and bad – good, because it cuts down on our “searching for the good food” time, which usually takes about two hours out of each day, and bad, because we end up eating a bunch of fried things.

Exhibit 1: fried potato on a stick.

• Patong is pretty normal during the day, aside from the topless sunbathers ironically sitting in the shade and the old men walking around with their Thai “girlfriends” and the other old men who are wearing too little and have spent too much time in the sun. You know, the usual stuff you’d see at the Jersey shore. At night – well, at night it’s not exactly PG-rated. While we were walking down Bang-la Road one night, Kevin whispered to me, “When we have kids, let’s not bring them here.” And I can’t lie, that made my heart melt a little. Not because Kevin was concerned about the welfare of any future little Currys, but actually because thinking about babies makes me smile. (Don’t worry Mom and Dad, it’ll be nine months at least before any little Currys!)
• The pad thai we’ve eaten from the food stalls is better than any pad thai I’ve had in the States. What’s the magic? Is it in my head?
• I think Patong Beach might have been really beautiful a few years back, but today with all the jet skis and parasailers and loud people everywhere, it’s not as nice as it could be. We’re now on a quest to find a quiet, tranquil island to stay for a couple of days.
• Bodega, the hotel we’re staying at (~$30/night) is awesome. The staff is super friendly, they have free food around 5pm, and I got a coke for solving their Rubik’s Cube! Guess which of those three things made me happiest?
• I got my first Thai massage today, which was really really good. I tried to convince Kevin to get one too, but he seems to think full-body massages are some strange form of torture. He looked at me askance when I asked him if he wanted one too. That’s right, I just used the word askance.
• Going to the beach is always one of those things that is better in your head than it is in real life. Because I don’t know if you noticed this, but there is a LOT of sand at the beach. And it gets everywhere. I just found some in my eyebrows. The water is nice though.
• Tomorrow we’re going to the Phi Phi Islands (pronounced “pee pee,” haha, which makes me laugh because I am five years old) on a day trip to do some snorkeling and swimming, which I’m really excited about.

See you on Phi Phi! Hehe.
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Thought of the Day: I always thought tuk-tuks were man-powered. But they’re not. They look like little fire engines.
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Picture of the Day: Me and my monkey friend – he just hopped up on my shoulder.

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My Thai

12/15/09: Patong Bay, Thailand

Today we spent over ten hours in a bus. Actually, three different buses. In the past several weeks, we had been told by a few different people that Southeast Asia is the easiest place to travel.

Hah. Ha. Ha.

After being woken up at 5:05am by incessant knocking on our door because our 5am bus was waiting for us at the front gate and we were still in bed (me dreaming about mango sticky rice), we realized that our 4:35am alarm had never gone off. This might have been because our alarm, my iPod, had spontaneously switched itself back to Eastern time after being connected to our computer, which we never changed from EST. Because, you know, when we turn on the computer we like to see what time it is at home and imagine what all our friends and family are up to (usually, you’re sleeping).

If that sounded creepy, then the real reason we never change the time when we change time zones is because we’re too lazy.

Of course, when the knocking happened at 5:05am, we still had half of our belongings strewn about the room and so we had to hurriedly jam our things into our packs (which will lead to a future post entitled “The Case of the Missing Floss”). We packed ourselves up in record time and then hopped onto the bus, with Kevin still wearing his mouth guard (he’s a teeth-grinder).

Anyway, nothing much happened on the rest of the journey, except the two bus transfers, one of which happened on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, which was a little unnerving. “Go! Get on other bus!” our crazy Thai bus driver said, as he unceremoniously shoved us and our bags off the bus. “But where is that bus going?” I wanted to ask, but the thing is, it’s hard to argue with a crazy Thai bus driver. Luckily, the coach bus we got onto said in big letters on the front windshield, “HAT YAI — PHUKET,” which reassured me that we would eventually end up in Phuket.

Which we eventually did. And even though we’ve only been in Thailand for a few hours, so far, it does not disappoint. The people have been really friendly and helpful (maybe excepting the crazy Thai bus drivers), the food that we’ve eaten has been excellent, and our room has a refrigerator! Awesome.

I’ll leave you by sharing a little conversation that we had tonight as we walked along Patong Beach.

Z: How’s the water temperature?
K: It’s good. Not too cold.
Pause
K: But not too warm either. It’s no Indian Ocean.
Pause
K: Oh wait, it is the Indian Ocean.

It turns out it’s not, it’s actually the Andaman Sea, but I didn’t know any better at the time either.
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Thought of the Day: I love Thailand.
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Picture of the Day: Smallest. Orange. In. The. WORLD. Yet another reason to love Thailand.

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Scooting Around

12/14/09: Penang, Malaysia

Periodically throughout this trip, I’ve had some brilliant ideas.

After I wrote that sentence, I tried to think of some examples to share with you but had trouble coming up with any except renting bikes in Taiwan. But you have to admit that idea was pretty brilliant.

Anyway, today I had another one of my brilliant ideas – renting a scooter to ride around Penang! And really, even when Kevin needed someone to show him how to turn the scooter on and even when he then wobbled unsteadily off into the alley by himself (“You go ahead and practice! I’ll get on in a few minutes…”), it was still a pretty great idea. Really.

Kevin got the hang of the scooter fairly quickly, and aside from a couple of helmet bumps, we scooted along pretty comfortably, Kevin driving 15 kilometers under the speed limit and me shouting directions from the back.

We scooted to the Kek Lok Si Temple, which is the biggest Buddhist temple in Southeast Asia. Kevin and I aren’t very good at visiting temples, since we usually don’t know anything about them except whatever they say in the brochure they hand out to visitors.

We're also not good at visiting temples because Kevin likes to pose in sacrilegious pictures.

Anyway, the temple seemed nice enough – it was really colorful, which made for some pretty pictures. We spent about half an hour there and were getting ready to leave when Kevin, who was at the front stairs, waved and motioned excitedly for me to come look. “It’s The Amazing Race! And sure enough, it was. Kevin offered up the idea of following the Amazing Race-rs around all day, which I promptly vetoed. I wasn’t going to let us spend our one day in Penang scooting around aimlessly looking for things we couldn’t find. (This is my employment of the literary device of foreshadowing: we will end up doing this anyway.)

Later that morning, we took the funicular train up to Penang Hill, which was a miserable half hour.

Z: What’s a funicular train?
K: I don’t know.
Ten minutes later, on the funicular train.
Z: At least I know what funicular means now.
K: What, an overcrowded, sweaty, smelly train that moves unbearably slowly up a hill at a 45 degree angle?
Z: Yep.
K: It’s funny they have a word for that.

I was hoping we would be rewarded with something at the top like, oh, I don’t know, a giant banner saying “YOU SURVIVED THE FUNICULAR TRAIN. HAVE SOME FREE ICE CREAM.” Instead, we ate an overpriced lunch and spent the entire time lamenting how we took the funicular train instead of scooting up on our beloved scooter. There wasn’t much to do at the top, so we took a few pictures and then took the long ride back down.

Disappointed by Penang Hill, we looked at our tourist map and decided that we would circle the island on our scooter, stopping by the Snake Temple and a few other places. This was another brilliant idea. At least in theory. The problem was, we soon discovered the roads that were on our very vague map were in fact highways. And also that we didn’t have a very specific idea of where anything was. So we scooted in the direction we thought the Snake Temple would be in. After about 15 minutes of driving, we realized the island might have been bigger than we originally thought (tourist maps are horrible with scale) and decided to just turn around. We were scooting back on the left side of the highway, when I spotted something that looked like a temple on the side of the road. “I think I see it! Get off here!” Unfortunately Kevin didn’t hear me until it was too late, but he was determined to go back to the thing I had seen. I tried to dissuade him – what if what I had seen wasn’t the Snake Temple? But he was driving, and I was only riding, so I had to follow him as we went back. This required a bunch of turning around, scooting down a one-way street in the wrong direction, and 10 minutes of frustrated arm waving. But we did finally get to the temple. And guess what?

It was the Snake Temple.

Thank goodness. Otherwise we really should have followed those Amazing Race-rs around. Maybe we would have gotten to see Phil Keoghan!
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Thought of the Day: I hate when they put actors on the front of books-turned-movies. You shouldn’t need a movie to sell a book.
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Picture of the Day:

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