Our last day here and I’m more red on my face, back, arms, legs, and feet then I was before going to the beach yesterday. We got up early around 7:30am today. Relaxed around the room, the room is really comfortable. Its like a little aparartment. If it had just 1 more room we probably could live here.

We went down for our complimentary breakfast. I had scrambled eggs with cheese, some watermelon, pineapple. To drink I had some tea. It was mint tea. Tasted great. No sugar in it, just that tea taste following by a splash of mint.

We are up in the room now and about to go down to the pool and get into whatever else we want to do.

Woke up in the morning, bright and early. Naturally we are waking up at 7 to 8 am every day. We went downstairs for some breakfast. I had eggs with cheese and some fruit with some orange juice and a glass of water. Trying to drink more water here because the heat is crazy. I’m a little red on my face, arms, and feet. Nothing too bad though.

Our plan today is to go to the city in Chaweng. So we did. We take a cab. It takes about 20 mins to get there. The island is pretty big. Today it is night and hot. The crowd on the beach is smaller, but more people here then at our hotel area. What is also interesting is the water is slight different in Chaweng. The water is crystal clear. On our side, its just a little cloudy. Still blue and very pretty, but its just a little nicer across the island.

We sat in the sun under an umbrella at a nice resort. Only $10 and they let us have 2 chairs and umbrella because we aren’t staying at the hotel and the beach property is private I guess.

Fai and I bought a little football and we played catch in the beach water. Lots of fun!

Then it started to drizzle. Then it started to rain. Then it got windy. The wind and the rain together turned in a storm. It was funny watching everyone gather there stuff and run for shelter, including us. We went into the resort and ate at the restaurant. I’ve been having Banana Smoothies just about every day that we have been here. Today I ordered a banana with coconut. I was expecting a glass with banana and coconut in it. I got a real coconut cut open at the top filled with my banana smoothy. Pretty exotic drink and tasted delicious!

Finally the rain stops and we are done eating. The heat is still pretty extreme. Sitting on the beach even in the shade I break a drenching sweat in a matter of seconds. I think I’ve lost about 4 lbs since we have been here.

We playing in the water some more. About 5 hours have passed. And did it go by quickly! We are getting tired so we head back to our hotel and we spend some relaxation time by the pool. We are exhausted. The sun is going down and now its time to take a break from the hot sun, so we go up to our room and kick on the AC and get cleaned up.

We watched part of a movie but now we are hungry. Next door seems to be a great restaurant so we go there. I got a banana smoothie again for my drink and I had massamon chicken for dinner. I give it 5 stars! So good!

We are worn out from the beach day so we end up crashing early in our room watching some movies and just kicking back.

Tomorrow is our last day here because we head back to Bangkok for a couple of days to spend some time with our family. Then we will go back to Ubon Ratchitani for some more family fun.

Once I get back to the USA I’ll start posting photos to go with these posts. Enjoying the time here while we can!

We are enjoying the pool and just sitting by the beach right now. We are going to head to the other part of the island today like we did yesterday. Right now its sunny and breezy. We just went swimming and are now sitting in the shade enjoying the beautiful scenery. This is the kind of place that you never want to leave. Its so peaceful here. Attached find a panorama of where I am sitting right now. Enjoy!

Today started off with our complimentary breakfast. I had scrambled eggs and some fruit.

Today we are going to go exploring the island. We started to walk around but quickly realized we weren’t going to make it far in this heat! We turned around and headed back to the hotel. Its around 11 AM and the taxi driver across the street doesn’t open until 12PM. He is living the life!

The other option you have is to just stand on the sidewalk and wait for a cab to come by. That’s what we did in this case since that guy wasn’t available yet.

Chaweng is the city on the island where all of the touristy kinds of stuff are located. We headed to that side of the island. Its about a 20 min drive. We went up on the beach. Lots of people here. People sun bathing, some of the girls are sunbathing topless. Some you wish that they wouldn’t. 🙂

We ate at a place called Arkbar. A big bar right on the beach. Nice spot too. I had a big salad with chicken. We tried a mai thai drink (I probably spelled that wrong, spelling doesn’t count – I am on VACATION!).

Unfortunately we didn’t bring our bag with our suits in them so we just kind of walked up and down the beach taking the sites. Staying for a few hours until we went back to our hotel.

The Fisherman’s Market is a very interesting place. You walk up and down this closed of area that is lined with restaurants and also small booth like food vendors. We got some chicken on a stick that was so yummy. Fai got us some dessert to enjoy later. We also got some coconut ice cream with sweet rice at the bottom. Everything we’ve eaten has been really good.

Its night time now and we are walking through the markets. Lots of people are here. We stopped and ate at a restaurant on the beach. The food was ok. This was the first place that we didn’t exactly think the food was outstanding but the atmosphere was amazing. We got to see some people light some sky lanterns. Only a couple of people lighting them off so the scene was not all that impressive. A cat and a dog just chillin in the restaurant around us.

We walked some more around the market and then headed back to the hotel. its getting dark. This place is pretty interesting and the people have been great as well.

Once we made it to the hotel we took a little tour of our room and then we down to enjoy the beach and the pool. Its very secluded and quiet here. You would feel like a celebrity with your very own private beach. Maybe 10 people here tops on the beach with us.

The water in the ocean is warm, unlike ocean city, MD where the water is generally freezing. Pretty neat. Its clear and blue. Small rocks in the sand, so be careful walking. Haha.

The pool is beautiful and the water is warm as well, but refreshing. Now I want a pool at my house just like this one!

April 18.

Right now we are in Bangkok. We are headed to the Sumai island. We need to take another short flight and then we will be in paradise. I’m looking forward to it.

We got up early again today and ate a yummy breakfast that Fai’s mom made for me.  She has actually been making me breakfast in the morning since Bandid is off at his work.

I’m eating eggs, franks, bread, bacon, and ham.  On the side they are giving me cucumber and sliced tomatoes.

Last night my flip-flops broke so we went to the mall and bought some new flip flops. Fai went shopping for books and i had a nice lunch at the steak house where i had chicken, steak and pork.  Quite a meal let me say.  All of it was really good.  I had a glass of water and lemon iced tea for my drink.

So, this brings us to what we are doing right now.  I’m sitting in the living writing these posts while it is pouring down rain outside.  They are having some quick showers today, but its raining pretty hard at the moment.

Tomorrow we are flying to bangkok and then flying to the Somui island.  I’m not sure how to spell it.  We will be there for a few days and then we are flying back here to spend the last couple of days with our family before we venture back to the USA.

We are glad to hear that our uncle mark back home is doing well and recovering.  Sending you warm wishes here from Thailand!

Early in the morning Fai and i went hunting for a place to get her hair washed.  I guess too much fun in the water really made her want to get her hair cleaned.  I also had my hair washed too. Its actually quite a nice thing here.  They don’t just wash your hair and that’s it, they massage your scalp and they wash your hair like 3 times and then apply conditioner.  So, that’s how we started off the morning.  The mission was simple, but being the day after the festival not alot of businesses were open early in the morning.  These people work hard here, but they kind of do it on there own schedule.  I think it was like 10 am and we couldnt find a place that was open.  Finally, we drove into the city and went to a place in this little shopping center.  We were under the gun to get to the airport because a few of our relatives and friends were flying back to Singapore and Bangkok.  We wanted to be there to say our farewells.

So we made it to the airport on time and we saw our friends and family and wished them a happy flight.  I hope they had a wonderful flight.

Then, we attempted to go to the new mall. It’s Tuesday and you would think things would have calmed down at the new mall.  No such luck, the place was utter madness.  We couldnt find a place to park so we ended just picking up the musician guy, mom, and the litte boy.  We did something fantastic.  We went to a zoo.

Its a long drive to get to the zoo, about 2 hours.  We drove and drove and finally arrived at a place that Fai described as the “monkey” zone.  Sure enough there were hundreds of monkeys just running around. free. No cages.  The amazing part is you can stop at this one area and you can get out of your car and feed the monkeys.  The monkeys are a little crazy so i didnt feed them, they can get excited when they see food so i didnt want to actually mess with me.  I just took alot of photos and some video.  It was pretty cool being surrounded by wild monkeys and also a little uncomfortable at the same time.  We were feeding them mini-bananas.  Too many monkeys arrived so we hopped in the car.

And we left and headed to the zoo.  The zoo was about 20-30 minutes away from the monkey zone.  The zoo featured some amazing animals.  Its a small zoo with some exotic birds, but the main feature attraction here are the Tigers.  The first couple we saw were good size, the next few were giant tigers.  Freakin impressive.  They had the tigers in fences.  Also made you kind of wonder how safe are we right now?  Those tigers are pretty bad ass.

They also a leopard, a bear, and some fish.  Clearly the tigers are the main act.

We had some ice cream and then headed on home.

They asked me what i wanted to eat and i said steak.  So we spent a while trying to find a steak house.  Finally, after maybe 30 mins, we found a steak house.  This steak was delicious!  Juicey and covered with a dark gravey.  Nice job guys making my dinner for me.  I also had a drink called the Midnight Blue.  Its a blue soda, though it wasnt carbonated at all.

We came home, took a little nap, and then Fai and i went to U-Bar to hear a live band.  By this time, we were pretty tired out.  We’ve been getting up at 7 AM pretty much every day.

They are early risers here.

This morning we Facetime’d with my mom and she got to say Hi to Fai’s mom.  I gave her a tour of our house and showed her my breakfast.  Since Bandid isn’t here Fai’s mom made me eggs, sausage, and bacon.  Very good!

Today was the final day of Songkran Festival and boy was it wild.  We spent the early part of the day at the mall.  I went into a number of tech stores.  In fact they have one whole half of the mall dedicated to electronics.  They have a Sony store, a Samsung store, and then a bunch of “generic” electronic retailers.  They are all set up one right next to each other. Nokia had a small dedicated booth in the middle of the mall next to a Samsung booth.  Samsung had both a booth and store.   When I would leave one, I would feel like I was done, but each store had something interesting in it to see.  I was mainly looking at cel phones and camera lenses for my camera.  Aside from the Sony store, most of the other stores didn’t carry Sony lenses.  They mainly carried Nikon and others.

After the mall we chilled out in the AC at home.  I was pretty wiped out still from yesterday.

I’m actually pretty exhausted now, but just know we have a lot of pictures and videos to share of the Songkran Festival.  Today we played in the water with Fai’s friends at the Proud Coffee Shop.  This guy has a great location because on the street where his coffee shop is located they had a band playing across the street and the coffee shop had there own booming sound system rocking.  Pretty crazy because the music from the band was loud and then we had our music playing so loud that we couldn’t even hear the band playing.  There were thousands of people that came through the street.  It was pretty chaotic.  Fai’s friends are all great. All of them super friendly and they do know how to party.

I have to get some rest, I’ll try to post some of the videos to my youtube channel. My channel is Robbiegod1.  I got a couple videos from this trip up there already. Take a look!

Good night!

April 15, 2013 11:45 pm.

Its the second day of Songkran Festival which ends tomorrow.  This post is going to be short because we are exhausted.  Too much Songkran.

Basically what we did is we rode in the back of the truck and threw water at other people on the street, in other trucks, those that were riding on motor scooters too.  This was complete madness, but so much fun!  We went to some of the more congested areas where its car to car, fender to fender and then we walked through the streets putting baby powder on the pretty girls faces.  Just part of there custom.  It was a crazy night.  We took video by putting my cel phone in a water protective bag. I’ll to post some of the videos soon.  I can say there is no way that they would ever let us do this type of thing in Maryland.

We went straight from playing in the water to a really nice karaoke party.  Lots of food, lots of songs, surrounded by family.

Just so you know we were escorted by 2 soldiers and a police officer through the Songkran Festival so we were in good hands.  They kept an eye on me to make sure nothing happened and showed me the ropes.  Thank you for that, I will remember this night forever.

its 11:45 PM on Sunday. Time for bed.