A lot of Rain

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Geo: 12.7953, 99.9662

After our early bed time yesterday we were awake and up by 7am and decided to go for a walk on the beach, which was quite busy for a small town. I took photos of different things until deciding that breakfast was well overdue - well maybe not but I was hungry. Mum felt sick so we went up to our room only for me to become sick after five minutes of being there so we went for a sleep. An hour later mum felt fine but I still felt sick but it slowly faded and we went for a swim. Knowing that the Scandinavian tour group left this morning we expected to be alone but another group had arrived, some stealing our chairs; how dare they!

After lunch we all went to the pool but within five minutes of being there the pool-boys started putting the umbrellas down, which with 100% accuracy signifies that it's about to rain, even though it's common sense that umbrellas are to protect you from rain (or so I thought). Mum and I felt small drops then it started pelting, absolutely pelting. In the time it took us to stand up and flip the lounge pillows up there was not one spot of dry ground and the rain was actually hurting with how hard it hit, we ran for the hotel foyer which inconveniently is outdoors and the wind was blowing the rain in just as hard. Under an umbrella mum and I ran to our building. Looking out over the balcony we could see the rain being blown harshly across the barren land with a few cows sheltering next to a fence.

With nothing else to do I started homework only to find that more had been posted; just what I need and want! For hours all we heard was rain hitting the roof and when we looked out the window everything was distorted because of the rain. At 6:15 it was lightly raining in my view and "raining heavily" to everyone else, but dinner couldn't wait so out into the rain we went. Dee-Lek was our restaurant of choice as mum and I had requested Western Food, just to find out how Thai's make it. Mum had a pizza and I had spag bowl which was surprisingly nice, I didn't expect much from it, I was glad to be proven wrong though, but I was still jealous of Nana and Pa's chicken and cashew nuts.

The restaurant next door, Tony's, had an empty over-the-top party which didn't surprise any of us as we still haven't seen one person eating there the whole time we've been here. We walked into Familymart to buy some yoghurt and Fanta but decided to buy the Fanta at a small shop down the road to help the locals out. Every time we walk past this particular lady she gives us a great big smile, her small empty, dirty shop has a few pool toys that look discarded in the back and two drink fridges, true to local style we only had to ask for what we wanted and it was bought to us and put in a bag with a cheeky smile despite Pa's efforts not have a bag. Despite never having customers, sitting out in the heat all day, having maybe five teeth and working long hours the lady was full of smiles and laughter. It's such a reminder of what we take for granted, how well we live and still grump about the small things; oh first-world problems!


With all the rain, frogs were out and gibberishing incredibly loudly; what I would have said was only in over-dramatized movies. While it was raining today I looked over the kiddy-pool which is being fixed in one part, meaning the water is going green and slowly being drained and saw that the water was higher than the spa chairs, I thought it was weird as last time I looked it was lower but assumed they were filling it up again for some reason. When we were walking past I commented that the area they were fixing was deep with water and they had almost completely drained that section apart from a few 3cm deep areas, it had filled up from the rain! The smaller part of the pool, 16m2 at a guess had filled up "at least five inches" as said by Nana, personally I have no idea how much that is but I can tell from looking at it that it's a lot, and all in three hours-It's insane! And of course being in Thailand the rain has nowhere to go with dodgy drains so our walk was in foot deep water. I can't even imagine it in the middle of the rainy season (the rainy season starts in July).

Every few hours, we would hear music blaring. It was a truck advertising a glasses shop located just up the road from the hotel. It drives very slowly around the block with the music so loud you could hardly think. On top of that, there was a voice screaming out the shop details (I assume – it was spoken in Thai!)

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