Alive and Well in Thailand

G’day all,

I've finally got around to getting into and internet cafe to update you all how it's going sorry it's taken so long. Well this has been the biggest week of my trip so far by a country mile. I have been so flat out I haven’t even had time for anything. My last weekend in Toronto was amazing. We lost our game against the Rebels but that didn’t stop us from partying. On Sat night we all went out to an American football game and we had 16 people from our team out to watch it. After the game we went out and partied the night away for my going away party and at one stage there was 21 of us all cheering “Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi”. On Sunday our coach threw a barby for the team and they presented me with this awesome autographed block mounted picture of our team and 2 packs of business cards for me to recruit players when I get home. On Monday I was busy packing and I fare welled the team one last time at training then Rob and I went up the CN tour (tallest free standing structure in the world) which was pretty snazzy. After one last beer with some of the boys it was time for me to head to the airport and start my massive 2 day mission to get to Thailand. I had 3 flights and visited Chicago and Tokyo on the way to Thailand and spent endless hours waiting for planes at the airports. When I finally arrived in Thailand I met up with my mate Pon at the airport and cabbed it back to his house. My feet were completely swollen from all the flying so I borrowed a pair of his cheapo flip flops and went for a stroll around his Bangkok neighborhood. It was awesome fun. The streets around his house were a maze of lane ways and each one had a good 3 or 4 dingo like feral dogs snarling and barking and my Aussiness, they were all howling like wolves and I yelled out “rack of ya mongrels” so they would run away instead of giving me rabies.

Bangkok day 1:
Well let me just say this city is bloody unreal. I’ve never been to a place so cheap, entertaining, and stinky in my whole life but I have to say it’s way cooler than I ever expected. I basically spent the whole day shopping and eating like a king. I think my cheapness glands are swollen up because I’m so excited about being here I can hardly breathe (or maybe that’s just the pollution) I bought a good 10 fake dvds today including ones that came out at the movies like a week ago and they are all like 2-3 bucks each. I also had a massive Thai meal including a drink and it cost me a whole $1.50. Taxi’s are so cheap here it’s a joke, you can sit in a taxi for an hour cruising around and it will cost no more than 3 bucks. They also have these little motor bike taxies everywhere called a tuk tuk. You can even chip a dude like 20 cents and jump on the back of his motorbike and weave around from A to B through the traffic even faster than a cab. The traffic here is absolutely crazy. There are 50 million motorbikes, tuk tuk’s, taxis, and smelly buses all cutting each other off and racing through these dodgy roads. There would have to be so many deaths a day on these roads no one even wears a helmet. Sometimes you see a whole family on a motor bike with no helmet cruising around a side street at 80km an hour. Pon went to work at 2 in the arvo so I went for a little stroll around town before having tea with his father later on in the day. I ended up going to this park with a lake and sat there looking into the water to chill out for a while. I was just staring into space looking at the water and I noticed all these turtle heads popping out of the water looking at me. When I turned my head to look back at them they got shy and ducked back under the water. I couldn’t believe it it was so weird. After ages an old Thai man walked up to me and sold me some bread crumbs to throw into the water. I grabbed my first handful and chucked them into the water, a moment passed and a few bubbles came to the surface. The next thing I had about 50 cat fish and turtles going crazy fighting for my bread crumbs and not only that I had a good 300 pigeons fly over and attack me. I had about 3 or 4 climbing up my arms to grab bread crumbs and they were all over my whole body and even in my hair. It was the funniest thing ever. Pity I had no one to laugh with though because I felt like a real boof head. I had a nice thai dinner with Pon’s Dad then we went out for a few drinks and fed an elephant some corn before heading back home again.

Bangkok Day 2:
Boy today was another huge day of non-stop action. After our big day yesterday we had a little sleep in before heading out to do it all again. Pon took me to this massive fancy mall before work called Siam Plaza and it was HUGE. I would have to be about 10-15 stories tall and it was chocas full of awesome shops like Mambo and Levi Jeans with sales of up to 70% off their already cheap as chips prices. It was definitely the biggest, fanciest, most modern and cleanest shopping mall I’ve ever seen. After Pon went to work I jumped on this cheapo dodgy bus and headed for the touristy area of Banglamphu. The bus rides was great fun I passed some sweet golden Buddhist temples and when I finally arrived in the traffic jams and polluted air I was pleasantly surprised how cool the place was. There were a lot of hippies walking around with the main street lined with the cheapest stalls of the coolest things. They sold everything from digeridoos to ninja stars. I ended up finding a good travel agent with the most awesome tours of parts of Thailand for dirt cheap. I’m planning on going to a full moon party on this Island called Koh Phangan next week then whipping my way over to the newly rebuilt Phuket. After Phuket I’m going on a 3 day jungle hike through the mountains above Chiang Mai including elephant riding and bamboo rafting and also mixing with those tribes that have really long necks. It all cost next to nothing to do, I totally recommend checking out Thailand it’s probably the best place I’ve ever seen so far. It started raining once I left the travel agent and boy did it rain. It rained so heavily that it turned the street into chaos an I even saw a motorbike slide over and two people fell off. It took me two hours to get home and it was a massive adventure in itself. I ended up taking a tuk tuk to the subway then got lost at my subway stop and had to get a ride on the back of a motor bike back to Pons house. It took me a good 2 hours or more to finally get home and get ready for a big Friday night out on the town. I LOVE THAILAND.

C ya round like Buddha's G-string,

Woodsy