New Years

Happy New Year from the future!!

I am finally in Phuket after a very long plane ride, it wasn't to bad though. The first plane was pretty awesome, it had a screen on the back of every seat that you could control personally. It came with a little remote attached to your arm rest that let you choose music or movies or games(totally played some minesweeper). I didn't make any new friends sitting around me, but I did talk to some interesting people while hanging out by the bathrooms in the back of the plane :) I also took a few pictures of Alaska while I was back there.

The second flight I made a friend while waiting to get on the plane, he was headed to Thailand to be in a fighting competion. This plane didn't have the nice screens or anything, but at least I was sitting next to someone interesting this time, a half Portuguese half African nurse from Switzerland that spoke French. We talked for awhile, her English was pretty good, and played some of a game of politically correct war (swear you could spend the entire flight on one game of war).

Once I got to Thailand it took forever to get through Immigration, but I was lucky enough to make a good contact while I waited. I met a lady in her late 50s that has been teaching English in Phuket for about 5 years now. I got some good advise about the area from her, but most importantly she knows quite a few fire dancers on the island and is going to put me in contact with them. After finally getting through immigration I took a decently expensive taxi ride to my hotel, got online for a minute, took a few pictures of my room, and then promptly crashed at about 2am.

The sun came beeming through my window at about 6:30 this morning, and I suprisingly got up with no problem. It was rather nice outside this morning so I took the time to actually see my surroundings (couldn't see much the night before) and of course took a few pictures.

So far most of the food I have had has been right on par with what I expted from an asian country, rice with some sort of meat and a little veggie. I decided to spend a bit today walking around the area near the hotel just to see whats here. Sadly most things are closed today because of new years, but there are still plenty of food vendors around. The sidewalks are very very odd, sometimes they are part of the shop they are infront of and sometimes just missing entirely. I was suprised to see very few people walking up and do the streets but damn are there a lot of motorbikes.

I decided to go get a cell phone today, so I took a motorbike taxi to Big C. It is definitely easy to get a taxi and they are cheap but a bit scary. When the guy dropped me off at the mall offered to wait for me to take me back, but I told him I would be awhile. I spent a little while just walking around looking at all the shops, and then found a cheap cell phone and got a card. All together it cost me almost $30 for the phone and 215 minutes. The mall also had a walmart type store in it, it was pretty much what you would expect from that type of store except when i got to the meat area. There were tons of counters with fish on beds of ice, and you got most of your meat like we usually do our fruit. They had bags you just fill up with whatever chicken pieces you want from this big tray that is just kind of sitting out there.

On the way to the mall I had seen a lot of things that looked interesting, so I decided to walk back. I walked into another strip mall type thing down the street from Big C and found one of the strangest shops I have EVER seen. The shop (well really stand in the middle of the walkway) was called "Phuket Fish Spa". They had big fish tanks set up with rims around them that you could sit on and just put your feet and legs in the water. I am not sure what type of fish were in the tanks but they were tiny and there were TONs of then. It looked like the fish just swam up in swarms and started attaching themselves to the persons legs. It was very odd...

I have currently only met three other people that are in the course, but Most people haven't arrived yet. Four more people are arriving today and 10 more tomorrow. There are 24 people signed up for the course but doesn't mean they will all show up.

Wow... what a long post, but eee its the first day here.

I will work on putting some pictures in this later... for now they are on facebook.