OK- I spent the early morning sorting through photos and prepping a nice gallery for you folks and planned to fill this post with photos.  But our internet connection is so slow that I keep timing out before the photos can upload. So… I’m posting the update without photos to appease those of you who complain we never update the blog.  Photos to be added hopefully when we reach a new hotel on Wed. or if I get lucky in the middle of the night tonight.

So we’ve been in Thailand a week now, almost entirely on the island of Phuket, just off the Andaman coast. Since Mike has to work on US time, which is 15 hours behind Thailand, we have spent most of this week living a surreal twilight existence. Target bedtime is somewhere around 5pm, although after some dinner, catching up online or the occasional showing of Dangerous Liaisons on Cinemax (really, you can’t tear yourself away from both John Malkovitch and Glenn Close being so brilliant), we often fall asleep a bit later. No problem for Jenn, but Mike has to be up by around 12:00a to start work. Then he usually has to contend with an excruciatingly slow and occasionally unreliable internet connection, sometimes making him want to poke out his own eyeballs in frustration. In other words, there has been an adjustment period.

Needless to say, we feel out of sync with the world when half our waking hours are spent in a hotel room at night, and we eat dinner about the time that most people are having lunch. After dinner, we always buy food for breakfast, since all the restaurants are closed for hours after we wake up and Jenn gets the rage if she has an empty tummy for very long. So we’ve eaten our share of Frosted Flakes and Rice Crispies with soymilk.

At least our hotel has a pretty swank little deck by our room, and a small pool (with a waterfall!) that we share with just two other rooms, so we nearly have it to ourselves. Unfortunately, it’s also at the top of a quite steep hill which has the dual purpose of making us so hot and sweaty that we need to jump in the pool immediately on arriving home and thankfully working off some of those French fry calories on the hike up. But it is a lovely spot to watch the sun rise and the town wake up, greeting the day with yoga or a little poi practice… and usually a few jet-lagged European or North American hotel-mates.

Since this is our official “practice living abroad while Mike has to work” period, we haven’t had the time to go tromping around as usual. I have had a hard time being in “real-life mode” instead of “vacation mode” and am trying to adjust my eating, spending and sight-seeing habits accordingly. Luckily, we are only a short walk from Kata beach, which has warm turquoise waters and the softest sand I’ve ever touched. Almost every day we’ve ventured down to the beach for a few hours to swim in the ocean and lay about reading. So what if we’re sometimes also drinking the best pina coladas we’ve ever tasted out of a beautifully decorated coconut, made by some lady at a little snack hut on the beach?

We are not on the most crowded and developed beach, Patong, or even the second-most developed, Karon. We actually spend the most time on Kata Noi, the least crowded beach over here. But white people seem to outnumber Thais and everything here is catering to tourists. For some reason, most restaurants are unable to commit to a nationality of food and end up serving Thai food, along with pizza, sandwiches and western-style meat dishes with sides… very little of it any good. It makes this area difficult to recommend, as we’ve been to other parts of Thailand that although developed and somewhat touristy, are somehow less obnoxious (and usually cheaper).

Due to the large population of vacationing Europeans, many women go topless on the beach. This is really the first beach I’ve been to where that is the case. Although I’ve never thought of myself as particularly modest, I had to work up a little courage to join the European ladies. Luckily I did, because it was really nice to swim in the ocean feeling just a little bit freer, and not have to worry about those pesky tan-lines or the way a bathing suit strap unattractively cuts a line straight across my back tattoo. No one on the beach seemed to pay any particular attention either- it was like Burning Man, but in the default world, and with more languages I don’t understand.

Yesterday, we courageously rented a scooter and drove nearly halfway around the island. More on that in the next post (with photos!), since this one is getting kinda ridiculously long as it is.

Oh yes- folks have been kindly asking after my health. For anyone who doesn’t know, I’ve been having some rather irritating stomach problems lately, like pain and projectile vomiting. It turns out I have Crohn’s disease, which is a lifelong condition and potentially a real drag. It has manifested most recently as gastritis and ulcers in my small intestine. Although it was becoming a bit concerning there for our first few days here, the large number of horse-pills my doctor prescribed now seem to be doing the trick. Last night I had my first completely “normal” meal that brought me the euphoria that can only be had from delicious food, a couple of well-made cocktails and some good conversation. We had Indian food, so I was really pushing it with spicy dishes that contained tomato and sometimes a bit much oil, topped off by a cocktail mixed with lime juice. But there I was, happily riding home, with nary a wave of nausea or stomach pain in sight. So I’ll continue to gulp down 6 pills a day and declare all’s quiet on the western front.

Tags: Phuket, Thailand