Back to the "old" life!

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After having spent 10 days at Suan Mokh, a Buddhist Monastery near Surat Tani (which meant getting up at 4.00 am, sleeping on bare concrete, well no, actually on a straw matt on bare concrete, getting no dinner, having to keep absolutely silent appart from the prayer before each meal - (can any one of you imagine that??? No talking at all??) And of course, needless to say: No alcohol, no other drugs and no sex:-)), we were ready to have a beer (or two) along with some funky music and possibly a smoke or something similar:-). So Lisa, Alex, Jonas and I decided to stop over at a major beach resort (not that we like that) on the way to Bangkok, since each of us had either a train to catch, a friend to meet or to move on to the next country (in my case Germany, brrrr....) and we all had a day or two to spare. So we ended up at Hua Hin, a rather biggish tourist centre full of English, German and American tourists.

Alex tried to convince us that we could find a cheap place right by the ocean.
He was raving about this place on the old squid pier that he'd heard of. I was extremely sceptical (cheap? yeah, maybe in places that weren't on the tourist map yet, but not in this major beach resort), and so were the others. I tried to guide the mop to the backpacker's strip 'cause I wasn't going to spend half a fortune, but for some reason we followed Alex to what we guessed to be the vicinity of the seaside.

We'd hardly reached the first building, one of the typical Thai hawkers jumped out in front of us and purred that she had some "cheapp cheapp" and "gooddd, verrry gooddd" place right by the ocean. First thing that popped into MY mind was something like "I won't believe it before I see it, and this little bastard is not gonna get ME!) but Alex exclaimed happily that we'd be absolutely thrilled to check it out. So she lead us through some kind of maze between the wooden bungalow type huts until we found ourselves on a pier - over the water....

....a pier????.....

....THE PIER!!!! Oh my god, I couldn't believe it!!! She moved on towards the end of the pier and stopped right before the last bungalow. She opened the door, we had a peek in and assessed that it was actually quite alright, roomy, clean, cosy. We looked at each other in disbelieve and kind of expected her to blurr out an exorbitant price...

....but she didn't!! After a little haggeling we got this amazing place for even less than the average pay per bed in a smaller, uglier and probably much dirtier place in Bangkok. Well, we decided that this deal was more than reasonable, and as soon as the hawker had disappeared we jumped around laughing, singing and cheering like little kids!

A few minutes later Lisa pulled out her loud speakers (she was carrying half a household, absolutely amazing), Jonas his drum's (he did too!!) and Alex and I went to get some booze. It didn't take long and the "old life" had us back:-)

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Photos

Finally back to the "old" life
on the old squid pier