CARDRUNNERS

 

Andrew

Our trip to Thailand began with some surprise. Soon after our flight took off, our captain came over the loud speaker and announced that we would land in Kuala Lumper in 7 1/2 hours. What!!! Over 7 hours? We expected the flight to be about 4 hours or so to Malaysia and then a quick hour to Phuckett. Not the case. To be honest, we did very little planning for this trip. We winged a ton of it. I'm fine with that, but it leads to surprises like this little gem. Oh well.

This flight was the first of several Malaysian Airlines flights we took while in Europe. Their service is amazing. They are constantly serving you food and drinks (alcoholic drinks are free). Even on the 1 hour flight to Phuckett we got served a full meal. On top of that, they have beautiful flight attendants. Pretty much every attendant that served me on my several flights was banging hot. Gotta love hot flight attendants. It's the only thing better than getting seated next to a good looking girl. There is one slight problem with Malaysian airlines though. The pilots weren't taught how to land a plane. I never get nervous about flying in general, taking off or landing, but by the end of this trip I was sweating balls whenever we had to land. This first landing in Kuala Lumper consisted of a couple of big bounces. Eventually we settled down on the runway and were able to slowdown. Bouncing during the landing is not fun. This was not the worst landing we would experience on our Asia trip.

We got to our hotel pretty late. I believe it was around 11pm. None of us were tired since we slept a lot of the day away on the planes, so we decided to check the area out. Here is a pic of us in the back of a "cab." The "cabs" there consist of basically mini pickup trucks with a roof over the back. In the back there is room for 4 total people.





As you can see, I decided to really dress up for this night out. The truth was that I thought we were just going to walk around, grab a drink or two and head home. We ended up having a late night. The nice thing is that in Thailand it doesn't matter what you wear. All of the women still think you are Brad Pitt. More on that to come.

We weren't actually in Phuckett. We spent most of our time in a small area called Patong. Patong is just outside of Phuckett. Here is a picture of the main drag at night.



Our hotel was really nice. Thailand is super cheap. We had easily the best hotel room in Thailand and it was considerably cheaper than anywhere else we went. We opted to get the cabana room at our hotel. That meant that our room had a jacuzzi in the back that led out to the main pool. Not bad, eh?





While we were in Tokyo, we went pretty nonstop with the sight seeing. We did some cool things in Thailand, but this leg of the trip was a lot more laid back than the previous one. The second night we were there, we decided to go check out a Muay Thai boxing match. This was something that had been recommended to us and I was really looking forward to checking it out. Since Thailand is cheap, we were able to get front row VIP seats pretty easily and cheaply. Here is a picture of us in our seats.



There were 10 fights in total. A lot of the fights turned out to be between two kids. It's hard to say how old they were, but I would guess they were typically in the range of 13-16 years old. Interestingly enough there were two fights that involved non Asian people. Believe it or not, they had a pretty big size advantage. Those two fights were the biggest blowouts of the night. There was blood. Below is a pic of some of the kids.



There was one guy that we all enjoyed very much. He was a guy that was just destroying cobs of corn. Destroying them. The funny thing was that he had brought them with him. As soon as he'd finish one cob, he'd be on to the next.



We went out after the fight and checked out some of the clubs in the area. Now's probably a good time to explain my Brad Pitt comment above. I'm basically convinced that every Thai girl in the area was a hooker. I'm not sure if they were hookers in the sense that we use the word in America, but I think they were looking to get money for having sex. I almost think it's just part of their culture or something. It's not like they would come up to you and say, "hey baby $500 for a BJ." The way it played out is they would come up to you and just start talking to you and hit on you constantly. Every girl in the entire country would hit on you! I'm pretty sure their end game was to get paid for sex, but I can't say for sure. It's possible I'm just a pimp. That's very doubtful though. I can understand why Thailand is known for illicit sex.

The next day we went to check out the beach that the filmed the movie The Beach at. It was a classic starring Leo DiCaprio. Actually, if I remember correctly, it was pretty horrible. It did include sex with a fine looking woman and some nice beach shots. It was off on a small island that we had to take a boat to.





We decided to head into the jungle in search of giant fields of marijuana (only makes sense if you saw movie). Alas, we did not find any. Here is us on our journey.



We got to do some snorkeling on this trip as well. I hadn't gone snorkeling in a long time, so I was looking forward to that. There were a ton of fish. Below is the area that we snorkeled in.





That night we headed out to the streets to get some drinks and have a good time. We knew it was the night before the new year, but we didn't realize what that entailed. When we got out, things quickly got wet. See, in Thailand, they celebrate their new year with water fights. I'm talking massive water fights. Everyone in the country arms themselves with knock off super soakers and buckets of water and just goes at it. We had been told that occurred on new years day, but no one told us it started the night before. You can see we went out very unprepared.



We convinced ourselves if we did certain things that we wouldn't feel the wrath of the water. For example, we said, if we go sit down at a bar and order drinks, they won't get us wet. What are you are about to see next is what happened immediately after we sat down at a bar.



Another dumb thing we convinced ourselves was that if we went near the bucket where people were filling up, we would be considered one of them and be ok. Immediately after entering the vicinity, both Taylor and myself got an entire bucket dumped over our heads. I'm not sure why we thought we'd be safe right next to a giant bucket of ammo.

Getting wet was unexpected, but not nearly as unexpected as what was about to happen next. Locals came up to us and started powdering our face. We got powdered! That was a phrase I had never uttered until that day. I said it many times in the next 24 hours. There was even a woman walking around and randomly washing people's hair. Make any sense to you? It didn't to me. I turned to Scott and said, "I think there's a legit change that a stranger is going to shampoo our hair right now." That was also a phrase I had never mentioned in my life. Luckily, our hair ended up being safe.









The next day we went out much more prepared. We purchased giant guns and wore proper clothing. The streets were full of battles. The key was to find the buckets that had ice in them. Warm water wasn't a big deal since everyone was wet already. If you got them with cold water though, it was another story. You could make people very uncomfortable if you soaked them in ice cold water. We were pretty good at having cold water on us.







The next morning we were not quick to get up. It lead to us almost missing our flight. We made it on at the last minute and headed off towards Hong Kong.

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• Andrew
  

  Andrew
  Chicago, IL
  

  
  

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