Don't let the bed bugs bite??

It's four in the morning but a full body itch/bug attack has woken me up and I figured the computer would probably be free at this hour. What better time to fill y'all in on the past two days.

I have very little concept of time and dates, but I think it's almost Wednesday right now. So on Monday I had another great day. I spent the morning at the Grand Palace, a truly grand and palatial complex of gold and buddhas and magnificence like nothing I've ever seen before. From there we ate some lunch (I had a cashew nut something) and then headed to China town. It was insane! Cars and signs and dirt and crumbling buildings everywhere. And huge crowds! And fried bananas in the street that I'm really regretting not trying. Ahh well.

Then we went to the Thai Boxing Stadium where we watched Muay Thai for hours, beginning with fifteen year old boys dualing it out. Kicking, punching,the works. Kinda crazy. We paid a lot of money for Thailand (sixty bucks or less) to sit ring side and we were front row. We could taste the blood and sweat. We could see the water spray off the face of each hit man. I didn't mind the real life violence as much as I do the pre-recorded variety.

We went 'home' to Khoa San road and ate Phad Thai off the street for 20 baht.

Yesterday after some quick morning tshirt shopping, we headed to the airport for our flight to Phuket. Everything was fine except for Sara's near loss of her backpack, and we arrived in Phuket, a Southwestern Adaman sea coast island, at around 5.

You may be wondering about the one year anniversary of the tsunami and what I've seen going on. In Bangkok I saw nothing and I'm not sure that something was going on, but I saw on BBC the events at the beach. When we arrived here we saw lanterns being released into the sky - very beautiful and touching - and that's all.

There was some concern that we would be unable to find a decent place to stay, and by decent I mean cheap, because we'd heard of the crowds and that everything had no vacancies. But we had an airport bus bring us to a hostel we'd read about somewhere, I think a Lonely Planet, called Bazoom on Karon Beach. This Beach is known for being quieter than the more famous Patong.

Happily, the hostel had lots of space and we booked for 150 baht a night - about six dollars. Here's where it gets hilarious. The woman couldn't speak English so we figured she was Thai. Fair enough. Until we realized she was speaking Korean. A quick look at the guests and the guest book indicate that EVERYONE who comes here is Korean!!! We are the only non-Korean guests and we delight in tricking them with a shot of Korean here and there. If only I were fluent it would be even better. What kind of a coincidence is that? Then, if not enough, we were sitting out on chairs in front of our hostel when a man came by with a Canada shirt. We called out to him, as we always do, and it turned out he was German. Then we asked him to take our picture and he counted us in "hana, tul, set..." The Korean 1,2,3. What? Are we starting to look Korean?

I'm getting tired here... and the bugs are following me.

So Karon beach bites the dust, at least at night. We ate dinner surrounded by families on holiday and worse than bad live singing of really bad eighties rock sung in thick Thai accents. Fat people are everywhere. And blondes. We're in America. We jumped in a tuktuk headed for Patong, where we thought the party was at, but to our dismay found ourselves in a freakish carnival full of the same "American Tourist" variety, though more multicultural than that, and sex workers. It's like we're in hell. Where are the chill pot smokers in fisherman's pants and hippy shirts that we'd counted on? Gone are the gorgeous men of Khoa San road, having been replaced with the men of the world who can't get any on their own accord. Why did nobody warn me of this fact?

So tomorrow we're going to have to make some decisions about where to go next because there's no way we're staying here for this many more nights. Anyone know where the young backpacking crowd is to be found?

I don't know what's up with this itch but there are bug bites springing up all over me and I'm not too thrilled by the whole thing.