The One EK asked me the other day if I had tried any meat dishes while here. I tried them the first week I was here, and, although I have literally eaten lunch at Lotus Vegetarian every single day, I am no longer a vegetarian. On the daily do I dig on that animal flesh. It was a forced choice to be quite honest. 10 years strong with only a couple of late drunken nights where I consumed somebody else’s Fellini’s in the fridge after picking off some pepperoni, sausage, whateversomething that I had zero desire to digest. Now I grab gai sadteh lae khao niaw si thang kwah on the way home from work frequently. Chicken on skewers with sticky rice and cucumbers on the side. Delicious and 25 baht.

So I’ll have to write some sort of farewell letter to my former lifestyle at some point. The conversion seriously just came straight out of necessity. Had I decided to maintain the lacto-ovo vegetarian diet, I’d be eating pad pak, fried vegetables, khao pad pak, fried rice and vegetables, khow plow pak, steamed rice and vegetables, or at Lotus Vegetarian everyday.

Oh wait, for the latter, I do that. Guess that makes me a daytime vegetarian.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

I’m telling ya, everyday is something new around these parts. Just today when I woke up and was walking to work, I heard this distant drumming, and sure enough when I round the corner, there are about 8 or 9 people in bright neon colors, some playing percussion instruments and the others wearing large Chinese dragon headpieces. They were processing down the street, and they were as equally fascinated with me as I was with them. I still don’t know the exact reason why they were parading down the road, but then again there is a huge laundry list of things that I don’t understand. Bet something will happen tomorrow also.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

Recounting shows me how long it has been since I’ve posted some stuff. About a month ago, I had to take care of some visa stuff down in Kuala Lumpur. Havings been given whatever many days I needed to get it, I went to Koh Phi Phi for the weekend instead which proved to be an absolutely fantastic choice. Perfect weather in paradise. Can’t wait to go back and explore things more exhaustively.

I was with Khun Ree and some of his classmates and, after killing some Chang on the ferry over there, we showed up around 4 o’clock and grabbed some food. K. Ree and I took off to catch the sunrise at the viewpoint. Although we got there a bit later than my liking, it was nothing less than fantastic to chill up there. The pictures included certainly can’t do that feeling justice.

While up there, I start talking to some Indian guy who is there with three of his friends and after talking about whatever, he says they are all on study abroad from Georgia Tech. No fucking way. Some of them even lived in Glenn. Awesome. They took pictures of K. Ree’s Buzzcard and we cracked up about all kinds of Tech related things. Chilled out with them after that also, and after drinking one too many 100 Pipers and sodas and smoking some fatties, we proceeded to do the turn around and they’ve disappeared sorta thing. A la Josh Cain aka The Ghost.

Layed out on the beach and did some stargazing later. I had been anticipating seeing this for a long time. Crystal clear skies that felt like being inside the planetarium at Fernbank. Unreal. Relaxed more on the beach and watched a fire show and knocked back more drinks. Ended up at some terrible open air club playing house music and that lasted for about 20 minutes. It did result in K. Ree’s friend David trying to hit on about 9 girls in a row which proved to be beyond hilarious. He was so out of it that they would straight up be laughing with us at it and he honestly had no clue. Shot down, moving on, Shot down, moving on, Shot down, moving on. 55555. Oh yeah, five in Thai is “ha”, so a Thai text phrase is 55555….get it?

We got the hell out of that placed and just made our way back to the beach where we drank buckets, yes buckets, full of rum and coke. Argh! Difficult to remember. All I know is that I had every intention of sleeping on the beach so getting to the point of passing out was no problem since when I’d fall, I’d fall directly on to my bed. Sure enough I did and was awakened at 7 am by a monstrous thunderstorm. Guess it worked out well, cause I was awake as the first person on the beach, and met a kid who was on his way to work. He asked me to follow along and when we got to his restaurant we ate food, drank shakes, and smoked up. No worries. The place was over on Long Beach and required a cool trek through the forest to get over there. I was thinking it would truly be awesome to take this path to work everyday. Nice. Check the photographic evidence.

Anyways, I spent the day taking the trek back, but with a camera this time and snapping up photos left and right. Swam around and saw schools and schools of fish around me. I want to snorkel out further when I go back next time. Finally managed to track K. Ree back down at some point in the early afternoon before we had to hop on the ferry to head back. Unfortunately, in our drunken excursion K. Ree managed to leave his bag somewhere on the beach, disappear for hours before I fell asleep, and lose his camera and iPod. Fuck. Asked the people we were drinking with last and although the answer was “Haven’t seen it”, we felt like they were thinking “Can’t wait to listen to some tunes while taking pictures.” Fuck. K. Ree looked around until literally the last second before the ferry basically started to drift away from the dock, but to no avail. The journey was ended on a shitty note, but even that didn’t detract from the amazing scenery we were looking at while we departed Koh Phi Phi.

8. So then it was off to KL for the visa stuff. I was gonna take a train down there, but the whole timing just didn’t work out. Considering a visa is a highly time-sensitive document, I decided it might not be the best idea to chance it with the tracks. Besides it was difficult in itself just to get some concrete information regarding when and where trains were departing from various locations. Phuket to Surat Thani to Haad Yai to Butterworth to KL. Yeah right, I foresee a million plus one obstacles in that endeavor. The flight was well worth the $47.00 I paid. Obviously we were heading south, so we got a killer view of Phuket and the rest of the Andaman Sea. Shots of Koh Phi Phi, Koh Yao, Krabi province and Trang province. Ridiculous stuff. Listened to the Ghana Soundz albums and daydreamed out the window for the hour-long flight.

Once I arrived in KL, I noticed it is one big fucking city. Perhaps one of the busiest places I have ever been. However, it pretty much is not my cup of tea. Hotter than a motherfucker. Full of Malaysians who possess a hundredth of the warmth that Thais have. Does have Petronas Towers which is…..tall. Bunch of other skyscrapers, one of the best transit lines ever (Nothing like the T though), Times Square mall which is 10 stories tall, has an amusement park in it, about five Phipps plazas, two movie theaters, an Imax theater, bowling alley, football field food court, and the best Chuck Taylors I have ever seen in my life. I wanted to swipe the credit card for about ten pairs, but I resisted. I was going to get at least one, but my top five were all sold out of my size. Highly limited editions the girl said. No shit I was thinking, I know my Chucks. Oh yeah massive amounts of fit women were found around the city. Fashion central. Did somebody say Esperanza KL? Wouldn’t be a bad spot I guess since money flows in and out of that city in massive amounts. Well, anyways, KL ain’t my bag, so I moved along back to Phuket.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

Saw a Thai guy walking down the street last Friday with a backpack on, an 8” speaker strapped around the front of him, and microphone attached to the device in the bag. He was singing songs as he stollin’ down the street and I immediately thought of Radio Raheem ‘cept this guy was more dope in a sense cause he was a simultaneously mobile soundsystem and DJ. Pretty damn boss.

I also think the guy was blind cause he had that “blind look”, HA!, if you can figure that out, ya know the look like he didn’t know where the fuck he was, and also he had a woman holding onto his arm in a “blind escort” kinda manner. Anyways, I’m crazy.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

Khun Ree has been here about six weeks or so, and it has led to my health completely deteriorating to the point where I got get my ass back to my routines. Certainly, I’m not placing blame on K. Ree, but, hell, we’ve had some epic incidents so far and they have all resulted in massive hangovers and me registering minimal sleep for weeks upon end. Anyways, homeboy is off exploring Bangkok and Chiang Mai, hot off the heels of being over at Railay, Phra Nang, and Tonsai for eight days or so, just chillin and getting into some daily rock climbing with achievements being celebrated with copious amounts of ganja. Sounds like an inviting spot. Can’t wait to get over there sometime and see it first hand. Fucking job eats up all my time, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do. So, as with a ton of other things…..in due time.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

I had mangosteen the other day for the first time. This fruit is illegal to export to the US because the fruit inside the outer layer cannot be reached with spray or something like that. Anyways, they taste absolutely awesome, and if you’re not careful you can stain whatever you are wearing with the deep red color that comes off that outer layer. The taste is a sweet, tropical one similar to maybe kiwi or peach. That’s probably an offbase description, but whatever. I need one in hand to truly remember the taste.

Also tasted rambutan the other week. While the taste is delicious, the look of it is even better. Like a fat strawberry with tons of bristle looking things shooting out of it. It’s awesome to see a pickup truck stacked to the top with them riding down the street. Even more awesome to indulge in one.

Speaking of food, before I came here, I read all kinds of things and heard all kinds of hearsay about how the water and food was gonna fuck up my digestive system for days and days upon end. None of that every posed a problem.

Until, I covered a story for the paper concerning an Australian woman who lives here in Phuket nicknamed Lady Pie. She runs a shop in Cherng Talay area and serves up Australian meat pies. As popular as they are in Australia, I couldn’t tell you where in the hell you would find something like that in Atlanta, so I had never had one in my life. She served up all kinds of delicious pies, gave me a couple of cups of tea, and a really really good piece of New York style chessecake which is something I was craving after having not been at home for my birthday where my Mom would have made one damn good NY-style cheesecake.

Regardless of the meal being delicious, it made me shit like crazy after it went through my system. Normally I wouldn’t share digestive diatribes with you, but I thought it was entirely hilarious that the food that finally fucked up my system was authentic Australian food. Looks like I’ll be keepin’ it Thai like usual.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

Anybody heard of Mims back in the States. The guy is from somewhere over there and he is all over MTV Thailand with a song called “This Is Why I’m Hot”. Well, if you ever hear it then, you can say you’ve heard the definition of a completely worthless rhymestyle. “This Is Why You Suck Mims” cause you can’t rhyme worth a fuckin’ dime.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

1. Witnessing a person rollerskating while holding a fishing rod and base jumping from the cliff type structure we were standing on. Weird.

2. Telling Coach Cobis from St. Pius to Stop Being A Jackass. Too bad I don’t remember the details surrounding that one. What a jackass that man is. Fuck you Cobis.

3. Walking past four kids with mohawks listening to Giant Panda and one of them saying “Yo put that Bloquera shit on…” Ha. For real.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

Phuket has a death rate of about 3.5 people per day from vehicle accidents. Motorbikes are the main way most people die, and often it is during high season over near the resort areas of Patong, Kata, or Karon.

So, having had this useful knowledge at hand, I learned how to ride a motorbike a few weeks ago, and it is surely simple as cake even though I had made it out to being a far more difficult task that it really is. My friend left hers over at my place a few Sundays ago and told me I could use it all day if I wanted. So I did. And what was gonna be just some practice around the area turned into me riding all the way up to Surin Beach around dusk and it was really fun but also scary as fuck at the same time. Especially since I was on Thepkrassatri Rd which is main drag on the east part of the island and is the only way out of the province for any vehicles. Bit of a whiteknuckle ride when those huge coach buses are flyin past you. I still don’t think I wanna get one cause it is truly some dangerous shit. Besides, rainy season is coming up and as it’s already maniacal, it’s even more so when torrential downpours spill outta the sky.

I’m looking into getting some transport though cause I need to get to exploring this area way deeper and getting there is half the battle. In due time….For now, I’ll take my chances with the person I’m riding with I guess.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

So I came here to teach, but like many things, it didn’t quite workout that way. A week or so after the TEFL class ended and I was job hunting, I got an offer from the newspaper here and decided to go ahead and grab the job for the time being. Teaching would have taken me to China and I was literally days away from moving to Dalian, China which is across the bay from Beijing, but then the job here came through.

The newpaper is the Phuket Gazette and is one of two English papers here. It is connected with The Nation based in Bangkok and is a pretty popular paper here, I think the circulation is around 300,000 or so, not sure but I thought I saw that somewhere.

I’ve been over there since the first week of April and it’s been goin’ rather well since I started. There are some things I dig, and plenty of other things that leave me dumbfounded. I’ve been doing Adobe Pagemaker layout for their advertising stuff. I also do editing for all types of stories from both writers who are native English speakers and from our Thai staff of reporters.

As one can imagine, even though it didn’t quite dawn on me until I got down to the nuts and bolts of trying to decipher it, translating a Thai’s written understanding of English can be a damn near impossible task at times. That part of the job isn’t completely awesome by any means, but I guess it’s manageable.

The major problem with the company is their pitiful means of communication throughout different parts of the organization, which can make for a shitty job situation when you are trying to get answers to the methods that they wish to use. Frustrating doesn’t half describe it.

Well, needlesstosay, I’ll keep you updated on my means of employment when they change. Slidin’ on…..

http://www.phuketgazette.net/

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

I gotta a friend who has a dog named Foy Tawng. He told me it meant ‘Sweetie’, but I looked it up and it means ‘Egg Yolk’. Hilarious.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

Drown out that pain with a tower of beer. Yeah that’s right, they have fucking towers of beer and I haven’t a clue what the quantity is, but it’s about 3 feet tall and they fill em up with Heineken and it has a barrel down the middle that is frozen to keep the whole thing cool. What an incredible idea, and if they have those in the States somewhere then who the hell is behind the marketing at so many bars. Those things would fly off the shelf at numerous places and I can only imagine our Clermont or Northside Lounge days with the towers in hand. Destruction!

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

Songkran Festival went down back on April 13th. I went out to Patong on Thursday the 12th and it outta control. The festival is solely based around a huge water fest. What was originally intended to be pouring a small amount of water over Buddha’s head or other peoples’ heads as a symbol of cleansing has turned into all out water wars. They even just haul out the fire truck and spray down everyone in the streets. Every bar has huge tubs filled with water, and if you’re smart you’re armed with a proper water gun. Soi Bangla is the main road in Patong and it was filled with people left and right for about a quarter mile or so. So, after the water fight was winding down, I headed back to Phuket Town and proceeded to shower up and then go back out for the evening. Went to a bar called Oasis to watch my friend’s band play, and sure enough the entire bar turned into a water fight around the strike of midnight. Soaked again! Then I headed down to one of my favorite areas which is called PoonPon. It’s a sketch kinda area and the biggest draw is the fact that the beer gardens stay open until 5 am and they are filled with people essentially right up until that hour. I went over to Jame’s Garden after Oasis, and somehow managed to continue drinking 100 Pipers.

At this point, the suggestion from my friend to go to Nai Harn Beach to watch the sunrise sounded like a perfect plan. And it was, except for the result of the whole night’s excursion, which was having a terrible hangover, and being sunburned like a lobster cause it was overcast and tricked me into thinking I wasn’t taking on any sun, additionally I was too wasted to remember key items like sunblock, boardshorts, a towel, sunglasses, and basically everything that any average job would bring to the beach. Oh well, I recovered nicely and it made for one helluva evening.

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

I’ve read the same SLAM magazine for three months. It does have a classic cover with King James rocking the new NBA logo ala Jerry West style, but damn I miss those issues that are likely sitting on somebody’s counter at 1041. As dope as the cover is though, it’ll never top the beyond classic AI cover. Oh well….

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Not That, Not This, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »

There ain’t too much on the TV round these parts but Boomerang from Cartoon Network remains one of my favorites. No Adult Swim cause I think the humor might go directly over the Thai mindset, but it sure is funny as hell to watch The Flinstones or The Jetsons in Thai language. I think satellite TV picks up Cartoon Network, but I don’t know if they air all the AdultSwim stuff. “The Never Ending Paaaarty”…..fucking hilarious, and I’d link it up for you on YouTube, but I can’t. Just type in: Robot Chicken Never Ending Party and proceed to laugh your ass off.

The top programming here in no particular order includes Real Madrid TV (went on top of the league over the weekend in one hell of a thriller against Espanyol, they were down 0-3 after 33 mins with a hat trick coming from the feet of Padiani, and then they stormed back and took the lead in the 87th minute…nice!), SuperSport networks; both of which air tons of Spanish League futbol and English Premier League football respectively, FA Cup final is this Saturday and I got ManU winning 2-0: “soccer” has become my new favorite sport, but that largely revolves around the fact that it is the only sport I really have access to for watching live. Unless you count the International Badminton Tournament or Pole Vaulting Competition I was watchin the other day.

What else? Fashion TV, seriously, I remember being in Miami for Traffic and seeing this at some club and thinking it was rather humorous to just show catwalks all day long, but I watch this quite a bit cause it has two key elements.

1. Women who are fit on the highest order
2. Pretty dope music that mostly leans toward the house style genre.

BBC World, some movie channel (TopGun was on the other nite and I was loving it), TITC which is some entertainment type channel, other crap that is basically worthless, and a whole bunch of Thai stations that are fun just to listen to for a while to realize how difficult it is going to be to get a stronghold on this language. Anywho, next station please….

Find Similar Posts in 9°28'51"N, 100°02'35"E, Upon Arrival : Drop a Line »