Occupation: Vacation

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To my family, friends and all others who follow me on my adventures, I am sorry I’ve disappeared for the last six weeks. Life has been a mix real life and running around the playground that is the in-between of childhood and adulthood. I will focus this entry on my time spent on the merry-go-round of life.

The first week in December was the King of Thailand’s birthday. He turned 82 and is the oldest living monarch in the world. Needless to say it was a big deal in Thailand. There was a huge assembly at the high school with everyone wearing pink shirts (the King’s favorite color). I attended wearing a new pink polo and a black skirt. I had forgotten that my students had never seen me in anything other than my uniform (black pants and a blue polo) and was surprised by the amount of teenaged boys tripping over themselves when Arjan (Teacher) Kelsey walked by.

Because of the holiday we were able to take a long weekend vacation. A bunch of us farang decided to check out an island to the east called Koh Phangan. It is known for it’s crazy Full Moon Parties and bumpin’ night life complete with various substances and liquids. Though, most of us were just excited to get out of Suratthani and not think about work for a couple of days. To get there we took a night ferry, which is a smaller boat with individual sleeping pads. Despite the rumors of lice and sketchy sailors, we all huddled together to protect our belongings during the evening.

At about 6am we arrived at our destination. I unfortunately had come down with a cold and thus spent most of the weekend in a fog. That day we decided to try and find an isolated cove that my friend had read about. We rented motorbikes and set out for the day. I was carrying another teacher on the back of my bike and thought the ride would be easy….oh no. We quickly found out that the island was full of VERY VERY VERY steep hills, many of which were made of sand and gravel due to the all the construction going on all over the island. We were doing fine for the first hour, however, had a minor spill coming up over a slippery hill. Fortunately my fellow teacher made it out unscathed, but I suffered cuts and scrapes to my right side. We eventually made it to the island but going in the ocean was no where near enjoyable, though the salt water was a good cleanser for my battle scars. The rest of the weekend was filled with lying on the beach (near our hotel), wandering the souvenir strewn streets and getting our fill of Indian food and fruit shakes.

Christmas came and went. It was difficult to be without my family, missing out on 22 years of traditions and having no one to share my inside jokes with. However, having a familiar face to share things with was rather nice. My friend John, who I completed my TEFL course with, came to visit me. He is currently teaching English in Bangladesh and decided to pop over to Thailand for his break. It was great to reminisce about life in the states and fill each other in on our new experiences. But as quickly as he was here, he was gone. Whisked away back to Bangladesh to begin his next semester. It was a difficult goodbye, not knowing the next time I would share his wonderful company…thank goodness for SKYPE.
After Christmas came New Years. We were given Thursday and Friday off of work and so the guy I’m dating and I took off for an island in the south called Koh Lanta. Oh yes, did I forget to mention that I am dating someone? Well, I’m dating someone, a wonderful someone in fact. His name is Jeeheon and was born in Korea but grew up in the Boston area. He graduated from Bowdoin in 2007, worked in Boulder, CO for a while as a ski bum and became TEFL certified here in Thailand. He is interested in getting into NGO work in the near future, thus the mutual attraction between us. We both share a sense of wanderlust and future goals and are very content with each other at the moment. We’ll see how things progress…but getting back to New Years… Koh Lanta was a beautiful relaxed island with an unusually large tourist population year round. The amount of Swedish tourists there also surprised me and made me miss my Swedish family, the Wejaker’s. Koh Lanta is known as a “family island,” a vast difference from the party atmosphere of Koh Phangan.

Jeeheon and I spent most of our time with Jeeheon’s friend from home, Robbie, and Robbie’s visiting girlfriend, Cait. The four of us enjoyed relaxing on the beautiful beaches, a day of snorkeling and sight seeing, massages and eating decadent meals. A particularly cool sight was that of “Pirate Booty Island.” It is a natural geological marvel. On the outside it looked like a big rock island in the middle of the ocean. However, there was a small cave that we swam through and exited on to an inside beach. If you can imagine a volcano type formation with a hole in the top and a beach and forest on the inside rather than lava, that’s basically what it was. Though there were tons of other tourists there at the time, it was still an unbelievable sight.

On New Years Eve we met up with the rest of our farang group and had drinks at a beach bar. Jeeheon bought me a pair of beautiful earrings made by a very sweet Dutch woman as well as a fun sundress to mark the occasion. We listened to live music, danced on under the stars and at midnight jumped in the ocean, letting the salty waves wash away the old year and fill us with exhilaration for the new year. No resolutions were made, only the promise to live life. We eventually had to leave Koh Lanta and return to Suratthani which we were sad to do. However, work has to be done, children must be taught and the world continues to spin. Though, the night we got home we started planning our next vacation, I trait I inherited from my father.

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