No Pictures

No pictures of the weekend in Bang Saen, full of absolutely nothing but beach-side relaxation and reading. Nothing more except the rough and tumble style accomodation for which I believe we overpaid. It was equipped with a western toilet (luckily) but no flushing apparatus. Let me break this down for you. In the middle of a 3 by 3 foot hole of a room, there is a commode. Imagine a standing bowl with nothing behind it, as in no tank. Directly beside is a basin full of water and a small bucket to help initiate the flow of gravity after usage. Outside this teeny-tiny room which serves as both toilet and shower sits a trashcan to place your used toilet tissue. In case you misunderstood, this is in the actual room where I will sleep. Above the toilet is a removable shower head. So, if your hand slips, the shower hose will very likely fall into the commode. No matter what, your toilet and everything around will be soaked.

I'm making this all sound much worse than I actually thought it was, for sure, but it wasn't fantastic. The room did have airconditioning (amazing!) and a television, which is always a welcomed treat. The top of the walls did not run all the way to the ceiling however, so we had loads of unwelcomed flying and crawling guests that didn't pay their fare share of the room, which was 400 baht total (about 14 bucks). In our search for accomodation in this ultra-western beachside town, we mistakenly said we were looking in this price range, so of course "400 baht" is what we found. Who knows what it actually cost, I'd say more like 300. Either way, very good to know for future visits.

Lining the beach are hundreds and hundreds of umbrella/lawn chair sets you can purchase for 30 baht a day per person. We did so both days and read and slept for hours. It was abosulutely wonderful. It's still off-season, and I imagine I really won't like it when there are butt-loads of tourists hanging out, but even now there are a number of Thais offering to sell food and random trinkets for money. It's that kind of touristy even though I wouldn't take it for such a place.

The Thais love their banana boats, and you can hear them laughing and screaming all day long out on the waves. They are weak-sauce though, and don't take anything too rough.

ps- i tend to write in the style of what i am reading, which is currently the bookseller of kabul. although i find the story incredibly interesting and worth my time, i'm not so keen on the writing style; which ironically, is my writing style today. hmph.