January 26th, 2013 - Visiting Phuket Town

After The Bug Incident, we emailed Mike to let him know what happened. Phuket Rental Properties (now SuperHolidayVillas) are just the agents that help people find places to stay, so they aren’t actually responsible for the places themselves. They do things like manage negotiations between potential tenants and landlords, and set people up with the perfect rental property for their stay.

But Mike, being Mike, insisted on helping us out and redeeming the whole moving experience for us!He called a cleaner to come in to go over the place again, and he treated us to breakfast this morning in Phuket Town (a fairly short drive away). We got a personalized tour of the area and visited the Gallery Café by Pinky. He’s friends with the owner (actually, he seems to be friends with pretty much everybody), so we got to learn a lot about the local scene. Plus, the food was fantastic--I had pancakes that were so good, I might have teared up a bit. They weren’t as good as my grandma’s pancakes, of course, but they were very good.

The Gallery Café by Pinky

This is Mike! Mike is nice!

He also took us to the local Tesco Lotus for groceries (Wal-Mart would be its North American equivalent) so we could pick up things like food and drinkable water.

This may not sound like such a big deal, but grocery shopping here is quite different from Canada. It’s not as impersonal; you don’t just pick up your goods, pay, and leave—for the most part. It’s harder to find grocery stores as we know them. Sometimes you actually have to interact with other human beings in order to find what you’re looking for. Especially since it’s all in Thai. (Now that I think about it, I’m really hoping that the opaque bottle with the cow on it that we bought is really milk and not, well, cow).

So, as you can see, we may well have starved without Mike’s help. And our moving experience has, indeed, been redeemed.

Thanks for everything, Mike!

-LuckyStar