Phuket....I'm moving to Thailand

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After a hectic year of state side living, I've decided it's time for another adventure. This time though, a 2-week trip just wasn't going to cut it so I quit my job, moved out of my apartment, sold all of my belongings and headed to the airport with a one way ticket to Thailand where I have accepted a position as a Math Teacher on the Island of Phuket.

My adventure begins at the departure terminal at Dulles Airport, where, upon arriving to the ticket counter I was told "there was no ticket under name." I told the man that there must be a mistake and he should check again, which he did and then said "oooooh JESSICA" and printed out my ticket. What he searched for before is beyond me....

The flights were relatively uninteresting, although Qatar Airways did offer 13, THIRTEEN, different star trek movies.

I had met up a with a friend's little sister at Dulles who was also going to Thailand, and then picked up another friend once we landed in Doha. Upon landing in Bangkok we picked up another 6 or 7 people, our group seemed to be expanding rapidly. We piled into vans and headed off to the hotel to get settled in.

We gathered a small group and headed downtown to the "weekend market". Our taxi managed to get separated from all the other taxis so our group quickly went from many to 3. The market was a ton of fun, lots of good people watching. I stopped and got coconut ice cream with corn on top, a local favorite..which yes, tastes exactly how you would think it would taste. There were a lot of people selling puppies (for pets I'm assuming...whomp) which I stopped and played with every 4 minutes (I now have fleas).

After a few hours of this we decide to head back to the hotel, although, it wasn't until that moment that we realized that none of the 3 of us knew the location or any contact information for our hotel. After a lot of miming and gesturing, we found a tuktuk driver that was willing to drive us to an internet cafe to print out directions. The tuktuk driver seemed to take personal satisfaction in making us scream as he made hairpin turns into oncoming traffic. He then tried to overcharge us for our death cruise, which I was fairly successful at negotiating it down. Once we had our directions and maps printed out from the internet cafe, we struggled to find a cab willing to take us to the hotel. No one seemed to know where it was. One cab finally agreed, but not before pulling out a magnifying glass and studying the map for a good 3 minutes.

We finally made it back to the hotel, grabbed a quick dinner, then headed to bed to get ready for our first day of orientation.

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Photos

Coconut ice cream with corn on top?
...actually pretty good

First Tuk Tuk Ride!
...to an internet cafe, since we had NO idea how to get back to our hotel.

Baby Alive
Baby Alive proved to be much more successful than Baby Dead. From the Qatar duty free store

Market Puppy!!!
Weekend market = I buy a new puppy

First Singha
After walking around in the heat all day, we stopped for a beer and people watching...Thailand never disappoints.

Thai Armor?
This guy was walking around with a police officer...I can only assume in their superhero department

Google Map Ebina hotel
Internet Cafe

Cab driver using a magnifying glass
...to try to figure out where we were...not inspiring confidence.