Birthday Bashes

Well, chalk another great time up, this time celebrating my big 3-0....I can't wait to see what this year holds. On Friday night, I had some people over to my house for a little chin dig. It was a blast. One of my friends brought her portable karaoke machine, all you do is plug it right into the TV. I thought I had died and gone to heaven! It was so much fun! We sang for hours. Pascale also made a wonderful chocolate cake for my birthday. Her icing is absolutely out of this world, and she made it especially thick for me because she knows I love it! Now, I'm not one for cakes, but there is just something about hers that I just love!

After Friday night, some of my friends went to Koh Samed for the weekend. So I headed down on the bus on Saturday to laze away the day and have some fun. Someone once told me, upon coming to Thailand, that Koh Samed is just a hop, skip and a jump away...quoting..."three hours, only three hours from door to door"....I guess that's only if you get a private taxi and a private boat to take you there. For some reason, I had blocked out just how long it takes a person to get to Koh Samed....but then again, nothing is easy in Thailand. So I call a Taxi to come to get me, ride a taxi to the bus station, where I have to wait for 45 minutes because I just missed the 11am bus, then get the VIP bus that is supposed to take us straight there, only to find out that it really isn't a VIP bus and it makes stops every 15 minutes or so....so needless to say, when I got to the pier and we had to wait another 30 minutes to get to the island, by this time it was about 6 hours of travel time, in the prime heat of the day, I was ready to just turn around. Finally we get on the boat, and it seems to go about 10 miles per hour, until finally we reach the land of Koh Samed.

I travel to my bungalow on a rickety song taow (or truck with benches in the back) and get to my home away from home, only to find out that someone thought it would be a good idea to build a bungalow over the free flowing ditch....that also just had to be a sewer from the smell of my bungalow. As I was brushing my teeth, I noticed that my feet were getting splashed...it seems that the sink didn't have a drain pipe, it just went right onto the floor and down a hole in the bathroom floor into the above named free flowing ditch......

Besides the 8 hour trek to the island that's only really 3 hours away and a bungalow that smelled rank, it really was a fun time with my friends. We played on the beach, ate wonderful food and the waves were so huge we even got some body surfing in.

Then the next night, we signed up for night fishing. I thought of adventures and pictured giant fish just wanting to be caught. They even said the fishing boat had karaoke....and that was definitely a selling point for me! First we rode the choppy waves to a spot for squid fishing, and then the fisherman taught us how to squid fish. You just drop the lure down all the way to the bottom, then pull up an arms length of rope, then just pull up, let it slack, pull up.....then let it slack...pull up....let it slack.....well...you get the picture. So finally, after 3 and a 1/2 hours of pulling and slacking, Andrew caught the first squid. It was really exciting and there was black ink squirting all over the place. But after about 4 hours with only a couple of squid we decided to head home. I guess the fisherman forgot to mention that it really wasn't the season for squid, nor did he mention that the water would be murky and so therefore hard to catch anything. Oh well, at least we caught a couple of squid for them to eat.