February 16th, 2013 - Chinese New Year Festival in Phuket Town

It’s the year of the snake, and we’ve just returned from a fantastic evening in Old Phuket Town! Phuket’s Chinese New Year Festival for 2013 is being held from February 15^th-17^th in conjunction with the 14^th Annual Old Phuket Festival. This is all taking place along four main roads: Thalang, Krabi, Dibuk, and Phang Nga. For the first time during our trip so far, pedestrians actually outnumbered vehicles—by a lot. The streets were teeming with people tonight.

A shot of one of the streets, before the festival had even really started.

February 3rd, 2013 - Grocery Missions and Taxi Misadventures

Today's Random Photo: Sunrise in Panwa

Mission: First Solo Excursion into Phuket Town
Objective: Groceries

Groceries, as I’ve mentioned before, are weirdly difficult for us. I’m certain we are doing the grocery-thing wrong. I mean, they’re groceries, this isn’t neurobiology or anything. And I did take a neurobiology class (God help me), so I should be capable of this, right?

And yet.

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.

January 27th, 2013 - Buying Bikes in Phuket Town

Went to get bikes (not the motorized kind) from Tesco in Phuket Town today while the nice lady Mike hired to clean our place was there. It’s starting to get weird being the only pedestrians on this island (or so it seems), so bikes seemed like our best alternative.

We took a taxi in. Taxis are expensive here, so we try to avoid it, but there are some places that you just can’t endure walking to in this heat.

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