On our third night in Thailand, most of the group left Phuket to fly to Bangkok for the rest of their trip. I am meeting my parents in Bangkok in May, so I decided I wanted to stay in southern Thailand for the full two weeks of spring break rather than go to Bangkok twice. My friend Molly M (also called Little Molly as she is less than five feet tall) decided to stay with me. After the group left, we had one more blissfully quiet evening in the villa before we moved to a hotel about an hour taxi ride south of Surin Beach (a luxurious villa is affordable when split 6 ways, lessen that split to 2 and it’s time to go somewhere else). The hotel we were staying in was in Kata Beach, and was in a great location on the main drag of Kata so there were lots of restaurants and shops within walking distance.
Our first night there we met up with some different classmates—this group was comprised of two more of my classmates who had been doing their own Thailand trip, and two girls that were friends of them from the States. We met for drinks at an outdoor restaurant with a live band. The band was funny because they were singing mostly American songs but with very heavy Thai accents. Another interesting thing about the bar was that directly behind our table was a pond covered in lily pads, and as the night progressed we also learned that it was full of frogs! The frogs got uncomfortably close to me a few times, and I was afraid all of a sudden I would feel one brush against my foot or ankle. Luckily, that never happened. The most entertaining part of the night was when the band played the YMCA….as the only Americans (this was the case throughout my entire trip, everyone was very surprised when we told them we were Americans. I guess because the US is so far away not many go there) we were the only ones that knew to put your arms up and to form the letters Y-M-C-A along to the song. Other people on the dance floor quickly mimicked what we were doing, but no one got that we were making out the letters. It made me realize that if you don’t know the dance, it looks like you’re just waving your arms randomly over head. It was absolutely hilarious to watch all these people just waving their hands in the air with no rhyme or reason, trying to copy us.
We met up with this group of girls the next night as well, and we went to an outdoor bar with a sand floor and met some local women. It was really a strange situation—these two women who spoke good English came up to us and just started talking to us. We learned throughout conversation that their job is just to talk to the patrons of the bar, in the hopes of luring more customers in. They both lived at the house of their boss, and the younger woman was talking about how she had been up the entire night before and was so tired blah blah blah. I looked around and noticed the rest of the patrons in the bar were men, and put two-and-two together that this was probably a bar to pick up prostitutes. Again, I felt really sorry for these women. After that bar, we went to the Kata Night Bazaar, which was another dirty place with sketchy people. It was like a mini-Patong, but since it was Sunday night was not nearly as busy. We occupied ourselves by playing a game of Jenga (all the bars have Connect Four, backgammon, and Jenga at them). I’ve decided Thai nightlife is just not my scene.
Picture: The group at the YMCA bar.
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