The 4 S's of tourism

Sun, sea, sand and sex. I'm sure my Grade 9 Geography teacher would be so proud that one thing I learned in his class actually stuck.

Beach! Just on day 3 in Pattaya, whore city by the sea and heading to Chiang Mai tomorrow morning. You can tell prostitution seems to be the main industry here as most of the women's clothing on sale in the street side vendors and markets are geared towards prostitutes or drag queens. Speaking of, I saw the most heinous lady boy in training walking back from the beach yesterday afternoon. Chubby, no older than 17 or 18 wearing a short muumuu, platform shoes, full tranny makeup and had hairier legs than I do. I was "what the????".

Everyone knows how much I love my iPhone but it's turned into a total flop over here. Being on a prepaid plan the data & web was just burning through my prepaid cards and for some reason the battery was running out. I'd go to bed with a full charge and in the a.m. it would be dead. So much for being all technamilogical while I'm away, I had to go pick up a crappy $30 Nokia, texting on it is so old skool.

I met up with a cute young guy from Isaan 2 nights ago, god bless the internet. We wound up going out for dinner last night, his English is pretty good and the only thing I could find fault with is he's a fan of Avril Lavigne. Luckily I don't think my eyerolling translated and he was surprised to learn that she's actually Canadian. I should have kept my mouth shut about her provenance and let him believe she was American.

I'm on day 5 of eating local food and so far so good. Ordering involves finger pointing, smiling, and shrugging of shoulders, I can't identify half of the ingredients but I haven't had any unfortunate side effects. It is actually fairly cheap to live here, dinner out last night at a roadside restaurant with Isaan boy wound up costing 220bht (about $8) and we had 3 dishes, rice and didn't even finish what we ordered.

I have to say I'm looking forward to getting to Chiang Mai. I really want to get settled in, get an apartment and stop living out of a backpack. It will be nice to actually have enough space to unpack and have somewhere that feels like home. I've always had a limited tolerance for feeling uprooted and usually by day 5 of any vacation I just want my own bed and my own pillows.