Day 4 started off like day 3, with pastries from the nearby Japanese market. After that Sam and I walked over to the nearby large public park. Below are two shots of the new condos/hotels that are going up all over Bangkok. The architecture is an interesting mix of modern contemporary and traditional Thai.
Like I said – construction everywhere…
The next batch of photos is from Benjasiri Park.
The game above looks like a more fun version of hackeysack – with a hollow wicker ball. I wish we could have played this in high school instead.
Squirrels in Bangkok are better looking. They are more monochrome and thinner than American squirrels.
In the middle of the above photo is the dermatology center where Sam and I got our faces stuck with needles on our first night in Bangkok.
On our walk back to the house we picked up food for lunch from street vendors.
Dr. Pornsak’s dental clinic is only a block away from Dr. Nut’s practice. There was another laughing foreigner taking a photo of this sign at the same time. Around 1pm we boarded our flight to Phuket. Nok Airlines served us these little gummy pineapple cake things.
On the mini-bus to our hotel we pulled up alongside this “crazy horse” car. I wonder why owner picked the phrase. Surely there aren’t that many Neil Young fans in Phuket Thailand.
The hotel room we purchased online was supposed to be great and the description said it was “on the beach.” It turns out this was probably the poorest quality hotel room either of us have ever stayed in. The bathroom was basically a large shower stall.
Of course the hotel wasn’t “on the beach” but across the street. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the “ocean view” had actually been the ocean and not the backside of another hotel.
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However, even if it had been an ocean view – the beach (when we arrived) looked like this:
Blegh! I’ve seen nicer beaches in Cleveland. The front of the hotel barely exists, hidden behind other businesses.
We were instantly pissed off, as we had been promised a fantastic ocean front resort of the kind you see “in the movies.” What we got was a dirty beach, shitty hotel room and a tourist trap area full of McDonalds’, Burger Kings, bars and tattoo parlors. I did get to experience some good looks, though.
We walked along the street looking for a place to have dinner. We settled on a decent looking hotel’s outdoor dining area. Sam tried to order a root beer float and had to explain to the waiter what that was. What she got was room temperature unfizzy coke (not even a full bottle) and a bit of ice cream sloppily shoved down in the glass.
oh, and that cherry on top… what you see there is all you get – they chopped off the bottom of the cherry!
I ordered a strawberry smoothie – clearly made from some prepackaged smoothie mix.
My dinner was a regular cheeseburger, which was fine except that I discovered Thai people don’t eat pickles. Instead, they just cut up cucumbers to LOOK like pickles.
Sam ordered some shrimp thing that wasn’t half bad. After dinner we decided we wanted to try to make it to either Big Buddha or Promthep Cape to catch the sunset. A driver we approached said that Promthep was closer. We later looked at the map and found that Promthep was twice as far away as Big Buddha.
Since our driver had taken us to a farther destination the sun had already set by the time we arrived.
I saw a path down to the actual tip of the cape and was determined to get there. Sam in her thin sandals – not so much.
It got dark very quickly, so I only spent a minute or two down at the tip of the cape and then ran back up in almost complete darkness. It turns out they don’t have any lights at the lighthouse and public park at the cape. So, unfortunately Sam was up there all alone in the dark for a few minutes while I struggled through the rocks and trees in the dark.
After we got back to town we decided to try the “fish spa” before going to our hotel and going to bed (our tour would start early the next morning). If you’ve never tried the fish spa – it is a unique experience. It is very disconcerting at first, but you get used to it eventually. It feels like a mild electric shock or advanced tickling. We only paid for ten minutes, but the shop owners weren’t paying attention and actually left us there for over twenty – at which point we asked them if we could leave.
