But I am alive and all those good things. We’re back in and around Toronto until the new year, so I’d love to see people and say hello. Thailand was great and I’d be happy to tell everyone about it in person.

Happy November!

Charlotte

Went to Penang in Malaysia for a bit. It was very cool. It reminded me of Toronto in some ways, except you don’t have to go to different neighbourhoods to get the different foods and cultures. You just have to walk half a block. I wandered through Indian, Muslim, and Chinese areas in under ten minutes, with different types of shops and different restaurants and everything.

Lots of English spoken here and, unlike many other places I’ve been, older people speak it well. A cab driver told me that up until 1981, school was taught in English, so people who went to school before then speak excellent English. Now, I believe, they teach in Malay, except I think that there are schools that are taught in Tamil and others in Chinese.

The food was all fantastic and varied – I’m looking forward to going back to Malaysia sometime.

We’re moved to a city on the mainland of Thailand called Surat Thani. It is really interesting, but no one speaks any English! Like, really, no one and any. Despite all of my travelling this is the first time I remember anything like the culture shock that we’re experiencing here. It is sometimes fun trying to find our way around, but it is amazing how tiring it is to try to do things and just have everything take 5 times as long as it usually does.

We’re lucky that most of the restaurants here only serve one type of food (or at least specialize in something), because all we can do is walk in and put up 2 fingers and then smile and nod when they ask us questions about our order.

So far we’ve got an apartment, a motorbike, a place to do our laundry, and a cell phone (though we got that on Samui which is very touristy, so that was kind of cheating – though we did have to change the plan we were using when we got here), but we’re still lacking basic things like, sometimes we can find the little shop that sells the big plastic tubs of drinking water and then sometimes it seems to disappear. Also, we haven’t figured out how to communicate, “No organ meats in our soup please.”

I think this is a fantastic experience and I’m really glad we decided to come here, but we’re going to have to learn some basics of Thai. It is really embarrassing not to understand numbers, for example, or yes and no.

Just had a two-hour Thai massage to celebrate the big 33. In case any of you have never had a Thai massage, it basically consists of being twisted into a pretzel and then stepped on. It’s really great! But at certain points you can only go on because you know it will feel really good when the masseuse stops trying to rip your leg off. (Chris suggested that it was more that they are trying to snap your leg off, rather than rip, but I decided to stay with my original word choice.)

When we walk from our apartment down to the nearby village and the beach, we’ve found that in order to avoid the highway we can walk through the back yard of the local temple.

When we walk through the back yard we always pass a bull under a tree.

We call him Ferdinand.

Thai New Year! We (me and Chris and his sister Liz) just got back from lunch – while walking we were drenched by water gun-toting Thai children. It was very pleasant to be watered in the heat. Splashing talcum powder on people’s faces also seems to be part of the festivities.

Shana and Chris's sister Liz and me and Joanne and Hiro and Chris and Takeo and Megan and Takeshi after all-we-could-eat sukiyaki and shabu shabu extravaganza (because eggs in Japan are so fresh, you can dip your fried meat into raw egg and you won't get sick and it tastes really good)

That was a super fun month. Thank you so much to everyone who showed us around and helped us find things and make sense of how things worked.

Last random thoughts

People in Japan use the subways and trains way more than even people in Toronto do. Several times when we were hanging out with people they would go to different stations 30-45 minutes apart to go to favourite bars or cafes or areas several times over the course of a day or evening. I liked it – we got to see lots of Tokyo that way. Also, the trains run on time and very frequently, so there isn’t a chance that you will get stuck at a station and have to wait an annoying amount of time to be picked up.

We slept on the floor on futon mattresses about one inch think. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as you might think. The floors are tatami, which means that they are made of woven rice something or other and they are pretty squishy as far as floors go. Not like squishy so you notice much when walking on them, but definitely compared to hard wood or linoleum or rock.

The bathtub in our apartment (and Japanese baths in general) rock. They are very short, so you can’t stretch out, but they are very deep so they go up to your neck and they can be heated to crazy hot temperatures. I could only stay in for a few minutes until I would start to sweat. Hiro took the two of us to an onsen – a Japanese public bath with special water pumped up from way down (100-200 meters). It was fun – you have to wash very thoroughly before you get in the baths and a lady gave me a long lecture about how the cold water bath (there were 4 different baths on the women’s side of the bathhouse) was kimochi (which was the only part of what she said that I had any idea about). We ate eggs that had been boiled very, very slowly in onsen water – the yolk was cooked, but not the white, which I’ve never seen before. You have to kind of crack the top off and slurp out the middle.

So yeah, we had a fantastic time. On to Thailand!

Here Chris is looking down on a tiny Japanese truck. Cars and trucks here are pretty interesting actually, some are much, much smaller than we are used to (to fit down tiny, cramped streets). Other than main roads there are very few sidewalks and the edges of the roads (and sidewalks when they are there) are full of speeding cyclists!

Like all island nations (British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, probably lots of others I’ve forgotten) they drive on the other side of the road. I knew someone in Toronto who had a little mini Japanese truck and it was fun because if you pulled up beside him on the road you could talk more easily through the driver’s windows next to each other.

People park here in amazingly tiny spots. I have no idea how they get into them and I assume that these parking spots were the impetus for the helpful backing-up-my-car-so-if-I-am-about-to-run-into-anything-then-go-off alarm that new cars are getting (though we would all use it for parallel parking). But the spots are really cramped, so much so that it is unclear if the home owner bought the house, measured the spot, and then went out and bought the largest car possible for that spot, or if they had to measure the parking for their car while buying the property.

Chris is impressed that we have a electric car charging outlet across the street from our apartment.

Chris went on a photo walk and here are a few of the pictures that he took.

First, some fellow photo walkers

Then our friend Joanne – note the seahorse lamp way above her head

And pink umbrellas

And NEW PIANOS

I didn’t want to wander around in the rain, so I joined them at the izakaya once they had finished photowalking and ate Karaage, which is Japanese for chicken nuggets.