last night, well really this morning we landed in Thailand. we paid the equivalent of 30 dollars for a hostel and what we got was basically our own little house that was 2 km from the phuket airport. Tamaras Guest House I believe it was called. For 30 bucks it was an AMAZING deal, it wasn’t one of those hostels with the bunk beds that I imagine when I think of backpacking though europe, it was just like an actual hotel room. It was way better than the room that I paid 73 USD for in Tukwila near the Seatac airport. AND they even have free wifi something that the Royal View Hotel was lacking, big disappointment there. I had to pay an extra 60 USD on top of the 70 USD for that hotel in Hong Kong. But whatever.
Now we are here in Pa Tong which is on the southern part of Phuket, which is an island in the south of Thailand. Once again we are in a hostel, oops I mean guest house that we found on hostelworld.com. Anyways this place is $20 a night and it is just a smallish hotel room and once again free wifi which I am using to post this blog entry. I feel that I should mention that I just checked expedia.com again to make sure I wasn’t stupid, and I found that according to Expedia the Royal View Hotel has free high speed internet which I know from experience to be FALSE and my bank account agrees. But that’s enough griping about the Royal View Hotel.
Thailand has been really great so far, we came to Patong, sat on the beach and relaxed, ate some chicken from a street cart, got ripped off by some merchants, then hand washed our clothes, and finally we walked around in search of food and decided to eat at the Patong Food Park on Rat-u-thit road. Rat-u-thit is the 2nd most important road in Patong, which is not saying much seeing as Patong only has two major streets. The other main street is called Beach St. and this street is how we knew for sure that we got ripped off.
I have learned two very valuable lesson from my experiences today:
- The people here can be extremely pushy when it comes to trying to convince you to buy something, it could be food, sandals, or obviously counterfeit Addidas track jackets (I’m pretty sure I am going to go back and try to get one of those jackets haha).
- There is no point in bargaining unless you understand how much the object that you are bargaining over is worth.
The second one is what got us. We walked away thinking that we got a little ripped off but then when we saw the store on Beach Rd. selling the same exact things for a fraction of the cost we, we knew we had gotten the shaft. This is the last thing on the bargaining, for some reason people here love to quote 550 baht(baht is Thai currency) for lots of things (550 baht is the equivalent of 18 USD). They will say that they are giving you a discount but what they are really doing is trying to get you to start bargaining. You will inevitably cut the price in half. Next the merchant will say something along the lines of “I can’t live off of that!” or “work with me!” or maybe “I have kids to feed!”, all of these are false. then you go from 275 right up to 300 and you have your item, thinking you got a deal. But really he probably would have sold that thing for as little as 100 baht. But anyways, that’s enough about that.
The food at the Patong Food Park was AMAZING for 280 baht (less than 9 USD), we got Chicken and fried noodles, Chicken fried rice, some thai veggie dish that I can’t pronounce, and a fresh cocunut. for 9 dollars both my girlfriend and I got extremely full stomachs and one of the best coconuts we have ever had. The problem is that if you want to eat on the beach the prices are pretty much quintupled. But the food was really amazing.
I hope tomorrow will be as great as today was. I’m sure it will, we’re going canoeing or something.
