Southeast Asia

Today was Christmas Eve and although it’s not a particularly celebrated holiday in Thailand all the backpackers and Farang locals in Pai create a half decent Christmas atmosphere. Dee spent the entire morning on the Internet and I spend the time walking around ton and doing a bit of shopping. I bought a beautiful skirt because it was only 150B and I wanted somethi8ng nice to wear tomorrow. I swapped my book in the used bookstore for a small fee, traded in “Harvest” for “The Firm”. I also picked up a couple of Christmas cards for Dee and Brendan.

This evening, the 3 of us headed don to the back of town where there is a little street with a lot of restaurants and shops. They were having a mini block party and everything in the street was open. Dinner was at a nice outdoor Thai restaurant and we went across the road to the witching well coffee shop for chocolate cake for dessert, it was the best thing I’ve eaten in Thailand. The entire street was festive and the atmosphere was fabulous.

There were fairy lights everywhere, along with red and green silk lanterns that had been hung above the street. All the shops were burning candles. Occasionally groups of people would come by singing Christmas carols to raise money for the local hospital.

Whilst sitting at dinner the resident homeless guy walked by with his pants down and it all hanging out for the world to see and an assortment of trash in his arms. No one even bothered to do anything or say anything, it was apparently not at all an unusual sight, he’s well known in the town. It was honestly about the funniest thing I’ve seen in Pai.

We had actually bought tickets previously in the week to Gail’s Christmas party for tonight but it was quite a ay out of town and we were all tired so we decided against going and went back to bed instead. Brendan is still really sick and has an appointment at the hospital tomorrow for a blood test. As we walked home, the town was letting off fireworks.

[PS. I apologise for the boringness off the past few days, not much has been happening. I promise it will improve.]

Tags: Thailand

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2006 at 5:03 am and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.