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Well this is just one big bloody disaster! Absolutely everything that could wrong seems to be messing up. Even the most simplest things such as asking if we can leave our stuff in a luggage room - and there is no luggage room, we have to leave it in the public area for the day! Or paying a lot of money for an elephant trek tour that includes pick up and drop off from your hotel, but actually no they won't do it from OUR hotel -_- its super frustrating.
We decided that today would be a "no alarm" day. As in we don't set an alarm to wake us up, we just wake up naturally (which I never, ever do!). However, it meant we slept until 1pm since our body obviously still hasn't to Thailand time! In fact I actually have no idea what time zone our body is set to anymore :O This is the fourth time zone we've been in since we left Poland - and we still have two more changes! I think our body clock is somewhere between Europe and Dubai… Maybe whatever Georgia's time is haha.
It took us ages to actually leave the hostel since I opened up a few emails that caused me a lot of stress. I have been conditionally approved to do a masters this year, however in order to be fully accepted I need to meet the requirements with my exchange grades. I got good grades in Warsaw so I'm sure I'll meet the requirements - the issue is getting my transcript from Warsaw to Otago! My Warsaw University won't release them until sometime at the start of March :( However classes at Otago start on the 24th of February, and also my student loan stuff won't be approved until I've been approved to do my course - and therefore I won't be getting my living loan which is supposed to pay for my rent and living costs :( So I had a mad panic applying for heaps of jobs online! It's super stressful.
So when we did eventually leave the room, we headed to the reception to try and sort out our pick up for the elephant trekking. After our first phone call, we were pretty mad because the woman said they couldn't pick us up, even though we're only ten minutes drive from the city centre. What made it worse is that the hotel she said we have to get picked up from is AGES, and AGES away. There's a list on the website of which hotels they do pick up and multiple ones are super close to where we are staying now. So we got the receptionist of our hotel to phone her back and try negotiate with her. But she continued to refuse - so tomorrow we're going to have to fish out heaps for a taxi when really they are meant to pick us up. I hope they don't expect a pleasant review on trip advisor!
Next we decided to go for a nice walk - which turned out to be a really good idea. We went to one of those fish spa things and it was an awesome experience! I forgot that I have SUPER ticklish feet and so I was crying with laughter for pretty much all of it. The guy running it was really nice - we went to go pay and he immediately cut the price without us even asking. It was 100baht for both of us rather than 79baht each. It made me really happy because we didn't even try and negotiate, he just offered straight away! So we went twenty minutes with our feet in a big fish tank being eaten by tropical feet whilst drinking milo from a carton (yes, they have it here!?).
After twenty minutes of having the dead skin eaten from our feet, we went for a biiiiiig fat walk which lasted for ages :) Unfortunately I still think this area is a total hole and am absolutely disgusting by it! But I love walking around anyway. I think the stable my diet here has been milo milk from cartons and plain potato chips (which are really tasty), and the occasional tasty ice cream to cool down. We ventured in to different parts of our area and discovered all the markets and prostitute areas. It was pretty revolting but all part of the experience I guess. We saw heaps of food carts with all the crickets, maggots etc! Also things like squid on a stick and so on. The food is definitely very different from anywhere I've seen! Also once again we witnessed heappppppps of old, fat guys with young Thai girls. But we found an area that obviously prostitutes were most easily found. There were quite a lot of open bars, and they're all sat around waiting or putting their make up on. It's pretty full on.
I also want to re-emphasise the Russian community here. Seriously, everyone seems to either be Thai, or Russian. Any white person we've seen who talks, talks in Russian. It's crazy! We also saw some kind of weird Russian domestic. There was this super skinny girl in bikini top and shorts and seemed to be drunk screaming and hitting this guy who was walking away looking smug on one of the streets. It was really weird and I'd rather not think in to it too much, but yeah we saw that.
On our way home we went through a huge market selling lots of things, mostly clothes. We also saw lots of handbags that had crocodile heads on which was rank :(
We had our dinner in a fancy hotel restaurant and I had some fried veggies with rice. Matt had a tasty green curry!
Now we're at home and I'm applying for lots of jobs online! Tomorrow we have our elephant trek so hopefully it all goes according to plan and no more stressful surprises! We'll head back to Bangkok straight after. We'll be back in Dunedin this next time week, phew! Xxxxxx
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