Start of class. Back to school

This is the view from our "villa"

Weve been in Rawai for about 5 days now, and we've been really busy. The classes are 9 hours a day.
Were all set with the time change, and surprisingly what Ive found so far is that life here isnt much different from life at home, minus the heat and the food being dirt cheap. We rented a moped sunday, it was $5 for 24 hours including a full tank of gas, and explored the areas around here.
Its funny how random things are expensive. we went to the Big C yesterday which is basically wal mart with 4 stories, it has everything from pigs legs to quail eggs. Beer is very expensive, around $1 a beer and it doesn't matter if you buy 1 or 100 its all the same price. i got lunch today at a nice sit down Thai restaurant right on the beach for about $1.50 including a can of coke. The area where our classes are is really nice, a lot of million dollar homes, but there are also slums right nearby.
They placed us in a group of villas, nice homes with a kitchen, living room, 4 bedrooms and two stories. heres the website http://www.naiharnvilla.com/ click on accommodation and you can see pictures.
all the people in our group are really cool from different backgrounds, (theres about 30 of us)and everone is around 25
we found out we are being placed with 7 other people in our area, which is a relief.
The beach is pretty amazing, the waves are huuuuge, and the water is warmer than bath water.
We had a snake in our Villa yesterday, about 3 feet long, and they maintenance guy caught one outside that was 6 feet long.
The beach we are staying at is called Nai Harn beach, and it has a monastary that takes up most of the beachfront land, making it much less touristy than most places in phuket.
Sorry about the choppy sentences, its basically been a stream of thought.
Ill try and throw some new pictures up soon.

PHOTOS

We added new photos to my Picasa page. The link is in the right hand column. Also, you can click HERE

Phuket Town and Ko Phi Phi

I’ll try to recap the last few days without going into too much detail; it feels like we’ve been in Thailand for much longer than a week and a half. On Monday morning we took a taxi through most of southern and eastern Phuket to Phuket Town. Phuket Town has a much different feel to it than the touristy beach towns. We were some of the only tourists there and a lot of things were closed down during the low season. This gave us the chance to experience Thailand in a more authentic way. Phuket Town is a large town with a lot of large shops and even a large mall. While we were walking around a group of children got really excited to practice some of their English and everyone was very friendly saying hi and smiling. We had dinner at a more local place than the touristy restaurant’s we’ve been drawn to.

On Tuesday morning, we came to Ko Phi Phi on a ferry. The boat was full of tourists from all over the world and a lot of large tour groups. When we got off the boat we were greeted by a “taxi” driver with a sign for our bungalows. He loaded our stuff into a large metal wheel-barrow like thing as well as one other persons stuff and a washing machine. He starts pushing this through town and through his broken English we’re told he’s bringing us to a truck. After about fifteen minutes of walking through town while this poor guy struggles to push this 300 pound load in 90 degree weather, we get to a large hill and Dylan helps him push it up to the truck. The small truck can barely fit everything plus us into it and we start to go up the hill backwards as we get up speed we begin to roll forward but we made it up. Our bungalows were
set in a hill with a view through the trees of the ocean. Pretty basic places with a bug net to keep the spiders away from Dylan (more likely for mosquitoes but this put Dylan at peace of mind). We spent the first day on the white sand beach full of tourists all around our age. The water isn’t quite as refreshing as you’d want on a 90 degree day, it’s probably in the 80s but it was still absolutely beautiful.

Dylan's fear of the large spider the size of my hand in our bathroom made for a move to Marine House, a guesthouse in the center of town. After moving in yesterday we went up to the viewpoint. Although it was overcast yesterday, it was still pretty hot hiking up there. The viewpoint was absolutely beautiful and well worth the effort. The pictures looking down on Ko Phi Phi are all from the viewpoint. Today has been
the first day we’ve actually felt like it’s monsoon season. It’s been raining all day with sudden showers that are like nothing I’ve ever seen. We were thinking about signing up for snorkeling today, today would not have been the day for it.

Ko Phi Phi really appeals to people around our age it’s full of bars and plenty of people handing out fliers or trying to sell you on a scuba or snorkeling trip; this is probably how people get their visa’s to stick around Ko Phi Phi. The town is small and although my sense of direction is lacking after a few days here I can manage my way around on my own. It’s full of small shops, restaurants, bars, day trips from the island, and plenty of internet cafes. There’s no “motorbikes” instead everyone walks or bikes around. The bikers and plenty of the wheelbarrow-taxis do their best to make you feel you’re in a city by constantly saying “bip, bip” to let you know to get over to the side of the path. At night the town becomes full of loud music and there’s even a bar with a kickboxing ring, if you box someone you get free drinks. The beaches are lined with BBQs and fire throwers. It’s a place I can see why people get easily sucked into it, it’s so laid back and beautiful. Tomorrow vacation comes to an end. We leave for Rawai tomorrow to meet up with our group to start our TESOL course. We look forward to meeting everyone and finding out more about what we’ll be doing. No luck keeping this short but we’ll try and write more often so they’re not so long.

Ko Phi Phi

We got to Ko Phi Phi today, an island a couple hours from Phuket Town. As the ferry made it closer to Ko Phi Phi there were jutting islands of limestone out of the ocean. We'll let you know more in the next couple days but it's almost midnight here and they close so thought I'd just let you know where we are. Send this blog onto anyone you think who would be interested.

Big Buddha of Phuket

You can see the people working on the scaffolding, this thing was HUUUGE

This is our fourth day here and it’s been pretty incredible. So much for monsoon season, it’s been beautiful weather, cloudy for part of the first day and raining overnight, but other than that it’s been sunny and hot. Probably jinxed it but we’ll let you know. The first two nights we stayed in a place called Kata beach, which is a really nice, little town and beach area. We’ve been staying in really nice hotels for dirt cheap, and eating pad thai noodles every day. Yesterday we visited the big Buddha, which is on one of the highest points in Phuket. And last night watched the sunset on the beach. The tuk tuks are a wild ride, and the people are very pushy, especially the tailors, selling suits that would look good in 1985. Everyone assumes I’m Australian and keeps calling me “mate,” which is not going to help them sell a suit.
The last two days we’ve been staying in Karon, which is right on the ocean as well. We’ve been lounging at the beach and pool with Singha beer, which by the way all the bars and restaurants bring to you in a coozy. The ocean is beautiful but a lot of the beach is too dangerous to swim in so we’ve been wading in it and today finally went in and swam a little. The first day was pretty much a daze because of jet lag but after that we’ve felt fine. We’ve been having a great time and are getting accustomed to life here.

We arrived in Hong Kong after a 20 hour flight full of reading, movies, Chinese food at midnight (something I’m surprisingly used to thanks to em and molls love of Chinese food) , backgammon, butt aches, Chinese food in the “morning”, and a Chinese stewardess wearing a mask, to find out later this is not uncommon there are quite a few people sitting in the airport wearing them as well. All in all we can’t lie it was a long flight. While I’ve been writing this Dylan has been playing with the camera. The architecture of the Hong Kong airport intrigued him so he decided to play with long exposure, we’re beginners but Dylan’s really taking to it and hopefully I’ll pick it up pretty quickly too.

laa kawn U.S.

We’re sitting in the airport, our flight departs in three and a half hours. Kyle and my mom dropped us off at JFK. Im happy because I got my gold bond through the security checkpoint without a hitch, Liz is happy because she got a neck pillow. There are stinky Europeans sitting next to us and the boyfriend is rubbing the girlfriends feet two inches from my leg.

We couldn’t ask for a better day great weather, good meals and no problems. Surprisingly I wasn’t “randomly” searched considering I look like an ex convict in my passport picture.

I’m not sure if it has set in yet that were on our way to Thailand for 8 months, but its starting to feel pretty real. We are very excited and I think a little bit nervous

We are also excited to have our new camera, Thanks Leah and Mike!, And as you can see were already taking some pictures with the lens recommended by mike.

Boston has never looked so good, or sad…

Thailand Bound

I've finally gotten to the bottom of my to do list with blog, bank, and hostel reservation left. Dylan's list is a little longer so I'll have to be the one to write the first blog. I'm not quite sure about this blogging thing, I've never been good at group emails and hopefully this will be a little less painful for everyone, those reading it and me and Dylan being good about keeping people updated...

Dylan and I are headed to JFK tomorrow afternoon. We have quite the flight ahead of us; we leave at 10:40pm and arrive in Phuket, Thailand at 11:20am on Thursday, it's 11 hours ahead, but it's still over 24 hours long but with plenty of ambien we'll make it.

We'll spend the first 10 days exploring around Phuket and maybe get a chance to see some other parts of Southern Thailand, not really sure how difficult it is to get places, guess we'll figure it out when we get there. We meet with our group of 35 teachers for a TESOL course starting on the 28th and will spend 3 weeks taking classes. From there we'll go to Bangkok for a 5 day orientation and for now it sounds like after that we're headed to the rural town of Chaiyaphum, in Northeastern Thailand, to teach high schoolers...that's what we know for and we'll keep you updated the best we can and hopefully be able to put some pictures up to make everyone jealous.