Phuket, Thailand

Sawasdee krub (hello). Last week I traveled to Thailand and spent most of my time in Phuket (pu-ket). I went to meet two of my friends, Marc and Jeff, who were already on vacation in Hong Kong and in other parts of Thailand, but we all met in Phuket. Marc’s father is retired and has lived in Phuket for 12 years, so Marc has been there many times.

The flight from Tokyo to Bangkok is about 6 ½ hours and I arrived to my hotel around 11 PM. The hotel was about half way in between the airport and downtown, so I did not get to see much of Bangkok. I plan to go to Thailand again and next time I will spend a few days in Bangkok. Jeff got into Bangkok the same day from another place called Pattaya. We had planned to go out for a bit that night but he was tired and we both had to get up early the next morning to fly to Phuket. So the next morning I got up at 5 am, caught the 6 am shuttle, and caught my 7 am flight, so that was Bangkok. On the flight, I was sitting in the middle of about half a dozen of those orange-robed bald-headed Buddhist monks. Not at the window or on the aisle but right in the middle of them, and they were also sitting in front of me and behind me, so I felt like I was intruding a bit, ha. We had a small breakfast on the flight and after one of the monks finished he packed up everything, put it neatly back into its box, put up his tray, and put the box onto someone else’s tray sitting nearby and the person was like “umm ok”, because what are you going to say to a monk? The flight was about 1 ½ hours and I waited at the airport for Jeff who arrived about 20 minutes later. Phuket is a bigger island than I expected. It took about 40 minutes by taxi to get to Patong Beach from the airport. Phuket Island is on the west coast of Thailand and consists of Phuket town and a lot of beaches all around the island, mostly on the western side. The island lies on the Andaman Sea which is part of the Indian Ocean. Due west is Sri Lanka and India.

Jeff and I arrived to the hotel and met Marc and his mother, who was visiting from the UK, lying by the pool. Marc’s father knows a lot of people in Phuket and was able to get us a great discount at a really nice hotel. The rate was less than 1/3 of the normal rate, so it came out to be quite reasonable. I had my own room and it was huge with a huge bed and on the top 3^rd floor with a balcony and a seaside view. Foreigners are not supposed to drink the tap water so the hotel supplies you daily with bottled water.

The Thai New Year, Songkran, was happening the first two days I was there. Patong beach is shaped like a horseshoe and our hotel was off on the south side of the beach. If you went into the main area, about 10-15 minutes walking, you better plan to get soaking wet. Street vendors sold super soakers and everyone dumps buckets of water on everyone, sometimes ice cold water. And they also come up to you and smear talcum powder all over your face. For some reason, out of the three of us, I was usually the target of the talcum powder. I tried to hide behind Jeff and Marc but they would swerve around them and come straight to me. So for two days and two nights we were constantly wet. Even at night people went out in their swimsuits and t-shirts and got wet and neighboring bars would have water fights with each other. One night we sat at one bar on the intersection of two main roads and were watching as people from two ends of the street jumped out and dumped water onto people walking by, cars and motorbikes driving by, and into the back of the tuk-tuk’s driving by with groups of unsuspecting people riding in the back. The tuk-tuks are local taxis, like mini pickup trucks, were you sit in the back in the open air. My friend Yumiko from Tokyo was in Bangkok at the time and told me that she was in a regular taxi and someone came up to the car, opened the door, and dumped a huge bucket of water on her, ha.

Thursday night there was a buffet banquet at our hotel for the Thai new year, with traditional Thai performances and a beauty contest with ladies wearing traditional Thai dress. When you entered the dinner area they gave you a lay-like thing (like in Hawaii) and at the end of the dinner you put it around the neck of the lady you vote for. Marc's father was the emcee of the dinner. The food was extensive, with tons of Thai dishes, oysters, prawn, a whole barbequed pork, Peking duck, beef, chicken, noodles, etc., etc.

On Friday, Jeff and I went to visit another island off of Phuket with a few of Marc’s Thai friends, Toei (“toy”), Bung (more like “boon”), and Tree (“three”). We planned to take one of the large charter boats to Phi Phi Island, which is where the movie The Beach was filmed, but we missed the boat. We got there on time but since it was still a Thai holiday, it filled quickly and left early. So we went to another dock area and rented a speedboat for the day, which was about $30 per person. Two Thai guys drove us to an island called Racha (or Raya) that was about 45 minutes from Phuket. They supplied us with water and sodas, too. When we got near to the island they stopped in a place were we could go snorkeling, which they also provided the equipment to us. The water is pretty clear and you can see probably 30 meters down. There were a lot of little black and yellow fish that we fed some bread to, and also some of those long straight spear-like fish and some bigger bloated yellow fish and also lots of jellyfish bits. After a while, we left and went to the beach on the island and lay out on the chairs and swam for a bit and ate the seafood fried rice lunch that we brought with us. It was so hot on the island, even underneath the umbrellas it was really sweltering hot, but I quite enjoyed it, it felt great. There was a little resort on the beach and also some little bungalows that had no electricity or a/c, but they looked to be all occupied. So while we hung out on the beach and in the water and walked around the island, the drivers just hung out in the boat and waited until we were done. After we returned to Phuket, we went to Promthep Cape to see the sunset. The girls said you have not visited Phuket until you have visited the cape, so ok I guess we had to go. There were a ton of people there for the holiday time. The view was awesome. If we weren't so tired we probably would have stayed longer. We drove along the west coast back up to Patong beach, so I got to see a lot of the other beaches, which are very nice and some areas were nicer looking and calmer than Patong.

Jeff and Marc left for Tokyo on Saturday, but I stayed until Sunday night. Most of Saturday, I took it easy and relaxed by the pool and read my book. Later in the evening I went out onto the hotel pier to watch the sunset. Just as I began to leave, Toei and Bung were walking down the pier, returning from dropping off Marc at the airport. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do that night and on Sunday so it was good that I ran into them. They invited me to dinner that night and took me to a nice place called Tunka Café on the top of a hill overlooking the city. I found this on the web:

At the very peak of Rang hill is one of the best Thai restaurants in the city, Tunka Café, run by a true gourmet and lover of Thai cuisine, Khun Thira. This is a great place to enjoy the view of the town from – and a great place to eat in. Khun Thira makes sure every dish in his restaurant is just right. (if you want to see the love that goes into food here, try Thira’s Som Tum, hot papaya salad). Khun Thira is also one of the best-known characters in town, and your day is made if you chance to meet him. And since Tunka is a favourite hang-out for the Thai staff of PHUKET Magazine, you might well find us there also – always with Som Tum on the table.

I forgot to mention that we traveled via motor scooters. I rode on the back of Bung’s scooter and luckily she is a conservative driver. I was freaking out a bit at first but got used to it eventually. Anyway, we had frozen mocha cream coffee and something with crab and something with lamb and vegetables and some seafood/vegetable soup and maybe something else I’m forgetting. But nonetheless, it was so good. Living in Japan, you don’t often get that type of cuisine unless you really search for it. Thai cuisine is definitely spicier and less bland, but there are also light refreshing dishes like mango with sticky rice and coconut milk, which is so simple but really good. I prefer Thai food to Japanese, which after a while tends to all taste the same.

On Sunday, Easter Day actually, the girls again invited me to do the cultural thing and go visit a large Buddhist temple. It was more a large complex of multiple little temples and one very large one. There was a cauldron on the premises where they constantly set off firecrackers as a means of giving thanks. And it is sooo loooud. I jumped every time it went off. To enter this particular temple you buy a flower, some incense sticks, and a couple pieces of paper with little pieces of gold paper inside them. Some Buddhist temples in Japan do not allow non-Buddhists, but this one did allowed anyone. Before you enter, you light the incense on a flame and leave them in a large tub with other incense sticks and them put your flower into another tub with a bit of water in the bottom. Then you take off your shoes and go inside. People were kneeling down and praying (or ‘paying respect’), then you take the three gold leaves of paper and stick them on the three monk statues that were inside, where a bottle of water sits nearby in order to spray to make sure they stick. Then there were two blocks that you throw onto the floor and they have to land on opposite sides, once they do you shake a can of small sticks until one of them falls out onto the floor. The sticks have numbers on them, so you get your number and go to another area with numbered cubby holes and read the note in the corresponding slot. They read more like fortunes or horoscopes, mine was something like “something will happen to you soon that initially you think is not so great but in the long run will be very good for you”. Which kind of scared me a little bit. Happy Easter.

Most everyone knows about the tsunami that hit the island in December 2004, however, I saw no visible signs of it. Marc told me he was at the Phuket airport when it hit and he couldn’t get back into town for the rest of the day or something. Our hotel sat on a roughly 20 foot rock cliff and the waves flooded the hotel up to the second floor and left boats in the pool, etc. Everything looked ok to me but I could notice some things were new, like a sidewalk or a rebuilt building. Overall it looks like they’ve rebuilt the island fairly quickly. I’m just glad another one didn’t hit while I was there.

So that was my 5 day whirlwind tour of Phuket. I definitely plan to go back to Thailand again and visit some other places and return to Phuket as well. Maybe next time for a couple weeks.

Ta for now...

Sakura

Our company Hanami picnic is next weekend in Yoyogi Park but there likely will be no more sakura (cherry blossoms) by next weekend, so I rode my bike around today for about 3 hours from my neighborhood in Nishi-azabu and into Ebisu then Naka-meguro and finally back up through Shibuya into Yoyogi Park. Then is started dumping rain and I still had to ride home so I got totally soaked but it was kind of fun to ride around in the rain.

Stone Rolling

Last Thursday evening out of the blue my company announced that they had 150 pairs of tickets to the Rolling Stones show the following night at the Tokyo Dome. They gave them away on a first-come, first-served basis the next day at 4 PM. Needless to say that I was in line and got tickets and ended up going with a bunch of work friends. They opened the show with Start Me Up and I think they finished with You Can't Always Get What You Want. I didn't know only 2 or 3 of the songs they played. During the night they also played Happy, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Tumblin' Dice, Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Women, Gimme Shelter, Sympathy For The Devil, Street Fighting Man, It's Only Rock 'n Roll, and I can't remember what else. I had never seen them so I was stoked, it was so great, especially free :D Japanese audiences are so well behaved, they don't go crazy or anything, they sit or stand and politely rock out. This one guy a couple rows ahead of me was dancing in this really funny way exactly the same to every single song they played, it was so distracting, I couldn't get him out of my peripheral vision and he kept making me laugh. A few of my friends knew only a few songs so I had to learn them by making a CD mix of about 60 songs to give them the full breath of the Stones. Arrrr, Rock! I've heard stories about them playing at this year's Super Bowl but I didn't see it and they sounded great when I saw them here. The jet lag must've had a good effect on them. The above photos were taken by my friend, Andy. He has a very large nice professional looking camera.

Congratulations, Linsey & Grant

I'm excited and happy for you both
And also a little freaked out that my little sister is engaged :)
Love you.

Skiing

So the past couple months I've gone skiing at three different places in Japan. First, one Sunday I went to Echigo Yuzawa about 1hr 15min from Tokyo on the shinkansen. I was supposed to go with three friends Andy, Florent, and Jeff, but there was no way I could get up in enough time to make the 6 AM train, meaning I would have to get up at 4:30 AM, on a Sunday, then ski all day. Well I eventually made the 9 AM train and made my way to Echigo Yuzawa. I thought there was just one ski area near the station but turns out, there were about six. So I tried to phone my friends but did not get through so I ended up asking for a suggestion from a worker at the station then went skiing by myself all day. It seems like the entire youth of Japan is learning how to snowboard. The runs are narrower than I'm used to in Colorado and there were a lot of people. Still, skiing for the first time in five years was fun. And the shinkansen ride was fun, too. I was on a double-decker type train and sitting on the top, so the view was nice and the ride was peaceful and quiet. As opposed to the ski lifts on the mountain which were blaring American hip hop and Japanese pop music. I got my groove on though.

Two weeks later I went with a large group of 32 people to Hakkoda in northern Honshu. It was about half people from work, the rest being girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, and friends. We flew into Aomori airport and then took a bus for a couple hours to Hakkoda. The mountain has been open to skiing for only seven years or so. It's not really a ski resort, just a mountain with a gondola. When the crowds are thick, you have to wait in line for about 45 minutes and the gondola ride itself takes about 15 minutes. Quite a different experience. The mountain is beautiful though. The top of the mountain is covered in snow, even the tall pine trees are almost completely buried and covered in snow, so much so that they refer to them as snow monsters. The hotel had an onsen, which is the Japanese style public bath. There are separate rooms for guys and girls, and you sit on a little stool about 1 foot off the ground and bathe yourself, then sit in some steamy hot water fed from a hot spring. There are all sorts of etiquette rules to follow while you're in the onsen, you only have a little towel to cover yourself, I thought it was a wash rag, and you're not supposed to put any towels in the spring water, so you just sit there butt naked with all the other dudes and fold the towel on your head. At first I wore the regular-sized towel into the onsen, not knowing I was only supposed to take the small one, but hey every gaijin is allowed mistakes.

Two weeks later I went to Kagura Mitsumata on the IT ski trip with a group from work. It is near the same station I went to the first time I went skiing. The snow was quite icey but the weather was sunny and clear, I got a nice burn on both of my cheeks that has peeled away now. We stayed at a Japanese ryokan, which is just a traditional Japanese inn type of place, which basically means they have no beds or towels. Our rooms were tatami mats and we slept on futons, just a cushion on the floor. In the middle of the rooms they have little tables covered with blankets, that are heated underneath, I think they're called kotatsu, which sounds very similar to tonkatsu, which means pork. So the running joke was "hey come put your legs in the hot pork".

Hanami time is approaching, when all the cherry blossoms bloom. The weather has warmed a bit and I can already feel my allergies acting up. Soon there'll be lots of people walking in the streets with surgical masks on to block the pollen and whatnot. It's just something they do here. It's quite funny. Another interesting note is that after WWII they planted a ton of trees near Tokyo and every springtime they create lots of gunk in the air. Just have to deal with it.

Chinese New Year in Yokohama

I'm 30 y'all

HookED 'Em!

Texas 41 - USC 38

Sayonara '05

My time in Tokyo for 2005 is coming to a close. I'll be going back to TX for the holidays and returning here in January. The end of the year brings a lot of busy time at work. The end of the fiscal year is Nov 30 and in addition there is the end of the calendar year on Dec 31. Two Wednesdays ago, we had our company-wide year-end party at the Grand Ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Tokyo. It was a circus theme, with clowns and a lady walking on stilts and a guy balancing on chairs stacked up to the ceiling. There was a prize lottery where employess won a digital camera, a 60GB iPod, a steak dinner, a weekend stay at the Grand Hyatt, a trip for two to Kyoto, and a trip for two to Seoul, South Korea. Needless to say, I won none of those. But the party was fun. And then this past Wednesday, we had our team year-end party at Hard Rock Cafe and karaoke afterwards. Additionally, I have started a new project and have tried to complete as much as possible before I leave for the holidays so that I can relax. I'm really looking forward to being home for two weeks and seeing family and friends. This has been a crazy year for me, going from NY to Tokyo to TX to NY and back to Tokyo and settling into my new job and looking for an apartment in Tokyo and making new friends in Tokyo and learning Japanese and all the while working harder and longer hours. I'm taking my camera home, so look out for pics from the holidays in TX.

私はテキサスにかえります。おつかれさまでした。

（；_・）

Yesterday was Labour Thanksgiving Day in Japan and we had the day off. Today is not a holiday here, but they are serving a Thanksgiving buffet at the cafe in our office. I just had my sad little cafe Thanksgiving dinner at my desk. They were worried that they'd run out of turkey, so they're giving half turkey, half pepper chicken. Rip. And the mashed potatoes look like mashed potato pellets. And there's no dressing. Missing home just a little today.