January 31st, 2013 - Central Festival, Phuket Aquarium, and the Not-Actually-A-Supermarket Supermarket

Internet, as it turns out, is a lot harder to figure out how to set up when all the instructions are in a foreign language.

I know, I know; you’re asking yourself, “But Lucky, why didn’t you just use Google translate like a normal person? Wouldn’t that have been a better use of the one day’s worth of internet from the front desk that you paid a ridiculous amount for?”

Well, that’s an excellent point you have there. But you see, that would have been too easy. I’m not the type to take shortcuts; if there’s a hard way of doing something, I will find it.


In my defense, though, most of the words I needed translated were actually in pictures and thus couldn’t have been translated by Google anyway.

After a few days of trying to get it figured out on our own, we reached a state of internet-deprivation that we could no longer endure, so we went to the Central Festival mall in Phuket Town to consult the professionals. The professionals being the very nice and very patient ladies at the AIS shop in the mall.


AIS is one of the primary phone and internet service providers here. When we went to Tesco a couple days ago, I bought an AIS Aircard (aka, an internet stick) for about 1000 baht, so we took this with us and had them load us up with internet. I’m still not entirely sure what happened. There were people, computers, vague helpless gestures (mine), lots of pointing, and (I assume) a healthy dash of sorcery, because, voila, we have internet. For a month, at least. We’ll have to go back to the store in 30 days, but we can handle that.

Central Festival is a beautiful mall, by the way.

This is just a shot of the outside entrance area of the Central Festival mall in Phuket Town. The mall is huge.

After our little excursion we figured, hey, might as well be grown-ups and find ourselves some groceries since our reserves of rice and cereal were already getting low.

We decided our best bet would be to walk about 2.5 km up the road from our apartment to what was advertised as a ‘supermarket’ in Panwa Bay Village.

The heat was so stifling by the time we walked there in mid-afternoon that we took a detour to the Phuket Aquarium for some air conditioning—and, you know, a fun educational experience. Geogirl will be posting a more detailed account of our visit to the aquarium, but here’s a picture:

We also walked along the pier beside the aquarium for a while, and ran into the same three gentlemen we’d met at the local waterfall the other day (see Geogirl’s earlier post).

As I was saying, though, we were ultimately looking for a supermarket.

Exhibit One: the sign leading us to believe we could find a supermarket in Panwa Bay Village.

As it turns out, supermarkets here are not supermarkets at all. I do recall reading about this somewhere while researching for our trip, but now I really understand what they meant. The ‘supermarket’ was essentially a gas station attached to a bakery, both of which were disappointingly overpriced. But it did, in fact, contain food, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Since we were close by, we stopped for dinner at a little place called Sawasdee. We’ll probably end up doing a proper review of it later, but the food was excellent and the atmosphere was friendly and relaxing.

In conclusion, we now have internet and food! We are unstoppable!

-LuckyStar