Canadians in Thailand -Shane's first blog post!

Recently the two of us have been fortunate enough to have friends and family come to visit us here in Thailand. Our house has had quite the revolving door. We had my brother Nick in July, my friends Nathan, Suds and Hammy in August, and soon Hannah’s brother Tim in September. We love Thailand and are thrilled to share it with whoever is willing to make the trip half way around the world. It is hilarious to see the shock, delight and amazement on our friends' and families' faces when they see things that have for us become daily life: wild driving, delicious food, beautiful beaches, street dogs and chickens among many other things.

Here are a few pictures from our adventures with Nathan, Suds and Hammy.

Riding a Song Tao on the way to Krabi

Exploring sea caves on Rayleigh
As not much of a sea cave explorer myself, I stayed and watched the boats... this turned out to be a good idea as the tide started coming in and the boats tried to escape.





The boys extremely excited to be renting scooters. Thai roads had never been more dangerous.
I don't have anything to say about this picture, I'm still trying to repress these memories.





Suds and me conducting a fire show
To all of you who are wondering "who gave Shane and suds fire???!" I think that the guy was a little drunk. Also there weren't too many people around so I suppose he figured any damage would be to themselves rather than others? 

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Beach bar on Ton Sai where the boys spent the night despite having already purchasing a room.
Shane doesn't mention that this is a picture of Suds and Nathan taking a shot of rum which had a snake and a scorpion in it. The very chill Thai bartender keeps it on the bar to attract the kind of people who want to drink things filled with snakes and scorpions. The cat was just along for the ride. 

 Deep sea fishing where we caught 6 tuna and 2 mahi mahi.
Well, other people mostly caught fish. Shane and I mostly tried not to be sick... I was more successful than Shane. Seasickness cures offered to us by our friends were "beer and cigarettes".

To those of you who can’t make it half way around the world we are glad to have you all as readers so we can share Thailand through our blog posts.
You should probably just come out though... seriously.

Kids will be cats...

Today was not one of my finest days as a teacher. It was the first day back to school for my grade 2s after a week of holidays (not sure why they had a week off... I still had to go to work). This class is rowdy at the best of times, and after a week of freedom they were absolutely out of control. By the end of the class I was totally out of ideas as to how to shut them up, after taking away half of their team points and refusing to let them play any games unless they behaved better.

We were doing a cutting and pasting activity. At the end of the class when I asked the kids to clean up, they sort of did, but brought me one gluestick without a lid. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. I only have 6 gluesticks for my whole class, so to lose one would really be a pain. "Nobody is going for lunch until we find that lid!" I bellowed. About 3 kids started looking for the lid, and the rest of the class dissolved into a game of "cats".

This is what it felt like. In this scene, I am off to the side losing my mind while the kids crawl around on the floor meowing and getting in cat fights. I hate cats at the best of times. At one point, one kid came and rubbed her head on my leg, meowing like some kind of feline demon. All I wanted was a gluestick lid. Why wouldn't they just find the damn gluestick lid? SOMEBODY COME AND MAKE THESE ANIMALS FIND THE GLUESTICK LID! After abandoning the search and ordering the kids back to their desks before lunch, I finally found the lid. One of my students was pretending it was a cat toy and batting it around the classroom. At this point my head blew up. I tried to enthusiastically thank the kid who brought me the lid, but I really wanted to turn into some kind of hulk teacher "YOU WON'T LIKE ME WHEN I'M MAD!!!" and sentence them all to some terrible punishment.

This is how it probably really played out. Teacher was freaking out at the front of the room, but didn't seem to be asking anyone to do anything specific. Cats sounded like a fun game. Hey, cats was a fun game! Let's see if teacher wants to play cats, maybe it will cheer her up and she will stop yelling...

Thai Street Food Extravaganza... Part 1?

One thing that we really DON'T miss about home is the VERY limited street food. Back home, you can get a sausage. That's it. In Thailand you can get just about everything...

We have been hoping to do a post about Thai street food for a while, but we just haven't had the camera with us during those quick street food runs! Tonight we decided to do dinner, street-food style.

 Mmmmmm fried chicken. Fried chicken in Thailand is SO GOOD with its thin crispy batter. This was fried in a BIG wok full of oil, over a propane burner on the side of the road. Perfection!

 Quartered tiny pineapples. At about 1/4 (or less) the size of regular pineapple, they are sweet and delicious; with none of the sour-ness in regular sized pineapple. These were for dessert.

 Noodle soup in a bag. One bag has the noodles, kale and bean sprouts and the other has broth and various meat (this time it was fish... not as good, we prefer chicken or pork soups).

 Steamed pork shumai, these are little dumplings filled with spiced pork. The bamboo stick is so you can eat them while walking down the street.

 A pork bun. This one was pork and preserved egg but our favourite is red pork. It is a rice-dough bun filled with spiced pork (or other delicious fillings). We often have red pork buns as breakfast on weekends.

 Dinner! Thailand gives out more than its fair share of plastic bags... what else are you going to serve take-away soup in?

 Here's the soup in a bowl.

Here is the chicken, pork bun and pork shumai on a plate :)

Hopefully we'll remember to take the camera out for some more pictures soon!

The Epic Chicken

First of all, while you are reading this post you must imagine the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you can't imagine it click the link... It is better if you play it at high volume, or imagine it at high volume at least.


He was resplendent. From his dazzling peaked comb to his fearsome talons. His feathers; a beautiful mosaic of reds, greens and blacks, shimmered like precious gems in the morning sunlight. He swaggered about the yard on his long, strong legs, puffing out his muscular chest as though he knew how remarkable he was. Onlookers gathered as time went on, pulling over their motorbikes to look at the chicken. Nobody had ever seen a chicken quite this epic.

In Thailand, there are often chickens running around everywhere. We live in the city mind you, not in a rural area. It isn't rare to see a couple of chickens scratching in the dirt in front of a restaurant or near a shady bush.

Chickens in Thailand would ruin Canadian chickens in any contest. Canadian chickens are soft, with their large breasts and short legs, they have neither the strength, speed, nor stamina of a Thai chicken. Shane and I call them chocobos after the Final Fantasy creatures.

The chicken described above was one Shane saw on the way home from work one day. People were actually pulling over to get a look at this chicken because he was just so handsome. Speaking of handsome, you may be thinking "Wow, look at that chicken picture, it is amazing! It is the best thing anyone has ever drawn!" Yes, that is because we bought a drawing tablet for the computer! No more will the male stick figures in our blog have no hair... with my drawing tablet I can give them hair and even maybe ears! They will still be stick figures though...

This Post May Be Offensive for Some Viewers (Cat lovers, I mean you)

In other news, we have this cat around our neighbourhood lately. Maybe it is in heat? Maybe it is just annoying, but it "meows" ALL NIGHT LONG.

Sitting watching a movie "meow!"
Get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, "mrrrraaawwww"
Trying to fall asleep "REOW!"
This is what I imagine the noisy cat looks like:

The green lines are stink lines. It is probably missing some fur and part of an ear. Sometimes the noisy cat will fight with another noisy cat. This creates even more noise.

We have tried speaking sweetly to the noisy cat, "here lovely kitty, go somewhere else you pretty cat"
and yelling at the noisy cat, "UGH! Go AWAY you stupid cat!". Nothing works. Instead we end up with conversations that go like this:
Hannah: "What do you want for MEOW"
Shane: "What do I want for what?"
Hannah: "for dinner! ugh, stupid cat."

Unfortunately he has chosen a rather obvious bit of cover...

We have many little house geckos, or "jing jok" living in our new apartment. They are shy little critters, coming out when the lights are off and then scurrying to safety as soon as we come in the room. Occasionally you see a tail or a brief flash of movement while one runs into a good hiding spot.

Except for one. We have one gecko who is either old and confused, or else really overestimates his hiding ability. Sometimes he will hide like this:

 ... that is, just sprawled out on the floor, frozen. They can kind of change colour, so maybe he thinks we can't see him? Other times he will choose something to hide behind, but usually it ends up like this:

... with his tail sticking out one side and his nose out the other. Once we even found him on the counter, licking a cutting board like this:

... he was licking up the juice from a pear we had cut there earlier. It is a little known fact that geckos love pear juice. Also, they have cute pink tongues.

Where will he be next? At the foot of the bed? In front of the TV? Under the laundry rack? We never know, but we are always amused by the gecko who isn't very good at hiding.

Lost Island and

Apologies on the long wait for a post... I've been up to my ears in a paper on Learning and Play as well as bidding farewell to Shane's brother and trying to restore order to our lives (remembering we're not on holiday is always unpleasant). So, 
After trying for AGES to find Rayleigh on google maps, and failing, I have decided that it must be like the island from Lost and therefore can only be found if you are meant to get there. Luckily this little peninsula is greedy for your tourist dollars, so as long as you have a couple thousand baht in your pocket you should be able to get there without a problem.

We left from Phuket after work and boarded a bus for the 3 hour drive to Krabi town. Shortly afterwards, two SUPER DRUNK Thai guys got on the bus and sat behind us. They barely had time to crack a "beer leo" before one passed out, sprawled across the entire back 3 seats on the bus. As the bus filled up with school kids (in Thailand a bus is a bus, and space is not to be wasted!) the last seat left was the one where the drunk had his feet.  The guy lying down is passed out, the guy on the right is his friend who was not impressed, which is why I drew him frowning. In real life they had noses and hair but I struggle with details in MS paint. The little boy came to the back of the bus and kind of stared at them, so the less drunk guy (on the right) tried to shake his friend awake so he'd sit up. "Argleph" he replied. There was nothing to do but sit on his feet, so the poor kid rode home having to sit on someone's sneakers.

We stayed in Krabi for the night, and then hopped on a longtail boat with some other friendly tourists in the morning. Even though Raileigh is technically connected to the mainland, it is very mountainous so the only way to get there is by boat. Our new friends informed us that we should go teach in Mexico after we finish here... hmm, new blog idea? lol

Rayleigh is a lovely little spot covered in prehistoric-looking mountains and with Thailand's signature beautiful turquoise bays. We stayed in a fairly fancy (for us) resort and spent a day and a bit soaking up the rays and splashing in the water. The guys even got a chance to do some rock climbing!

 I title this picture: cheesing it hard.

 Can't you just picture a pterodactyl circling those peaks? In case you don't have a good imagination, it would look like this.

 After a lovely weekend we were sad to leave, but luckily we didn't have to take the bus on the way home as there was a ferry leaving for Phuket that day! We got on a longtail boat which took us out to the ferry in deeper water, and then had a lovely ride home. We were so glad that Nick got to come and experience a little bit of Thailand with us!