Thailand

There will be no order to the pictures or how they are presented. Just basically spur of the moment and the story will unwind with no regard for narrator thread. 

This first picture is from the first surprise, from the room. Imagine storming in and rushing into the bathroom the first thing, like you do, only to see the dark wall light up as your roommate starts to unpack. And around that time, you're surely not able to lift yourself off the porcelain throne :) Who has a full-wall window between the bedroom and the toilet? One-way mirror would be something else, but this? And to make matters more interesting, our friends Darren and Kelly were actually upgraded into a room that was more or less the same, except there was no window! No… how shall I put it… soundproofing.

The next picture is the Ila Lounge, the bar for us who went All-Inclusive. Truth be told, we shouldn't have. It wasn't really cutting costs and you did get somewhat tired of the food in the restaurant. And the drinking in the bar, with the local booze, was on the shifty side. Still, perhaps we saved something on the bar tab :P Some good memories from the place though, ranging from late-night pool games to semi-disfigured russians in too tiny swimming trunks and hairy cadavers of bodies, ordering drinks in the harshest manner possible, then tossing some cash as a tip.


There was a lot of critters in the country. The beach swarmed with sandcrabs, hermite crabs and stuff like that. Fish and jellyfish and lizards - there's a reason they call it the jungle. And this little fellow snuck past the bar into the internet room. Who knows what he would be punching in on the keyboard with his tiny claws in the small hours of the night? "Claw and order?" "Shell on Earth?"

I really don't know what the name of the hotel meant. Apsaras, pronounced Apsalas, probably means something like orchid or orchard, since there were flowers everywhere. Also, there were huge signs of various orchids and their cultural significance put on the walls. We had a flower along with the welcoming drink as we arrived. All the tables in the restaurant were adorned with flowers. We had flowers in the bathroom, fresh every morning, as well as a flower on the bed. What IS our obsession with killing flowers? Is this like a threat? Putting a dead vegetable on the bed, like hinting "you're next." Perhaps the Thailander's way of compensating for not having enough horses' heads for the beds.

Here's Örjan. Or not really, but it looks a bit like him. Örjan was a small gecko we had as a houseguest. The geckos were really everywhere, especially crowding the lamps on the walls of the restaurant. Our little Örjan was really tiny, with a stump tail, blackened at the end. Vendela felt sorry for him, with the thought that he wouldn't survive on the poor choices of food served. Personally, I think he would get fat on the coconut oil and eat the peeled-off skin from our sunburned little husks. Maybe he was drawn to the fact that we shed our mortal coils… we probably reminded him of his parents. Little Örjan was caught by Vendela in her cap, and then she let him out on the balcony.
Last picture for today was Vendela's new haven, the Library. Yes, a magnificent institution well worthy of the name. People left books there that they had read and wanted to get rid of. Since our choice of literature that we had brought fell out of Vendela's taste, she had to fraternize among the tomes. And what untold treasures were revealed when she hit the shelves, I cannot discern. Let's just sum it up with the thought that they were probably put there for a reason. Reminds me of the benches in the old school dances…. Yep, I remember the view from those…