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.