Thailand - Land of Contradictions

Funny moments and general summary...

1. Pancakes - sometimes along your travels you meet great and truly fascinating people. Other times you meet people who are interesting characters/crazy/possibly on drugs, like our dancing island friend, Pancakes. Yes, we had all had a few buckets that night, but dear old Pancakes was clearly off his rocker. He earned his name by his clear passion and art form of making pancakes at his pancake cart. However, as the night progressed he kept abandoning his pancake cart to try and get us to dance with him and invaded all our pictures, as shown in the photo above. Pancakes - thanks for the laughs, you wont soon be forgotten...

2. "Excuse me, is that a giant fossil in your living room?!?" - I can hardly remember this entire story, it really was that lackluster (and it's very much a 'you had to be there' situation). Basically, we hired a driver to take us around to some cool sights, including a whale fossil. We get to the top of a mountain where the whale fossil is. Turns out the fossil was pretty much being kept in someone's outdoor living room. Literally there were a couple chairs, a coffee table, 22inch TV, and oh, a giant whale fossil. It looked very much like an over-glorified home accessory. Turns out museums do know best, it's all about presentation. It kinda felt like Thailand just played a practical joke on us - and yes, our driver was laughing...

3. Thailand thinks we're lesbians - As hard as Kate and I tried, we could not escape couples massages. After the first couples massage incident, we tried to make it very clear that we would like separate massages. Nothing worked. I think we had 3 or 4 couples massages over the course of our trip. Although it was a bonding experience we ended up laughing over, it got to the point where I was feeling like I might have to reassure Joe that nothing was going on between Kate and I.

Overall - If I could change one thing, I really wish we could have stayed with one of the hill tribes. Actually, make that two things, I wish the weather was nicer. This trip was definitely us being tourists looking from the outside in, which I feel misses the main purpose of traveling. However, given our time constraints and wanting to see and do so much in such a short amount of time, we covered as much ground as we could. This trip was great in that we got to see a lot of sights and do a lot of things we would have never done otherwise, and we met great people along the way. All in all - I'm very grateful for the experiences I've had.

Here's to the good, the bad, and the funny,

Jillian aka Jilly, Jillypet, Jillybean, J-Dilla, J-Bones, and sometimes Crab Cakes