Thailand

Thailand was amazing. We had a great time relaxing and catching up on some much needed sleep. We swam in the pool, swam in the ocean, explored the island, got massages, got facials. It was glorious. It did rain the last 3 days but that's what you get when you go in the Low aka Rainy Season. Nonetheless, it was wonderful. The only slight hiccup was the food poisoning the last day that haunted me on the airport, airplane and for 2.5 days after we got home. That wasn't great. Everything else was though. Especially since I found a new favorite drink....Gin Fizz. Who knew Gin was good? Not me...but it is

In recent news, before I left, I bought tickets back to the States for a one month trip back home. I leave next Thursday for a month of hanging out all day and working at night. Wish me luck!

Kata Beach, Thailand

Corner room, extra large deck and Jacuzzi!

Only pic of the room, lame I know

Rainy day

Rocking the sunburn and crazy face...photographer my husband is not

Hubs with one of the kitchen kittens

Amazing trip!

The Resort

 Hope everyone else's summers are going well. I think blogging on my part might be a little slow for the next month or so, so please stick with me. I will be back :)

Bo yao baby

We are leaving for Thailand tomorrow.

Could not come soon enough. I have been so stressed that I got a stress mouth sore that hurts like you wouldn't believe. So I started looking up home remedies and found one with liquid antacid plus antihistamines.

So we went down to the pharmacy and tried to mime to the woman that we were looking for antacids.

We were pointing to my stomach and she said "bo yao baby" to which we replied bo yao, bo yao...thinking of course that we were reassuring her that no no, I was not pregnant...yeah (we had been drinking)...she brought us back some pills and took out the directions so we could read. I read and read and thought ok until hubs frantically pointed at the top that said contraceptive pills.

Bo yao means "Don't want" ...mei you means "Don't have"....oops

So the woman thought we were frantically reassuring her that no no, we did NOT want a baby.

1 whole week of relaxing on the beach is just what the doctor ordered!

Yuck

This is a small post but it just had to be repeated. I am pretty sure I have mentioned this before, but in case I am wrong, a lot of Chinese people have a very different way of cleaning things. While I don't believe that everything needs to be doused with chemicals to get it clean, I also do not believe that cold water disinfects.

The other night, Will and I went out to one of our neighborhood restaurants. We were having a great time and then after 5 drinks, I needed to pee (shocking, I know). This is a pretty nice place, although at night it definitely has more of a bar feel. Anyway...I walk into the bathroom, wait for the stall and then walk in...and my first thought is "Shit, why did I wear flip flops". That should give you a clear understanding of what the floor looked like, which is also what the seat looked like. Add to that, that bathrooms in Beijing almost never have toilet paper and I was really wishing I did not have to pee. This place rivaled just about any gas station bathroom I have ever seen.

So, I finish up my business and start to wash my hands. The ayi must have been waiting to get into the bathroom to clean it, so she pushed past me to get started. As I turn to dry my hands, I see her one single rag cleaning the seat of the toilet, the floor covered in all manner of fluids and then the counter-tops of the sink. I swear on everything that is holy that I almost threw up right on the spot. Instead though, I just said to myself (in my head) that this is China, so don't be surprised. I have heard worse stories and before I leave, I may witness things more shocking. Yet...ick.

R&R

So, I know that Thailand has been the topic of my posts lately and I cannot wait until we get there. This month and next month are going to be great. In exactly 7 days I will have been married for 2 years (according to the State of Georgia) and in exactly 23 days, it will have been 2 years since my wedding. Not usually separate days for most people, but they were for us. We needed our paperwork to get started on lickedy split and we had to have our marriage certificate in that bundle of paperwork so we got married at the courthouse on June 10th 2010. It was super unromantic and we both agreed that we felt nothing during the "ceremony" except (for me) maybe a little embarrassed that we were getting married in the middle of a hallway where prisoners were being escorted to their day in court...awesome, glad you could be here to share the moment. Anyway, 16 days after that we had a beautiful religious ceremony with friends and family and that was wonderful.

At the end of this month we are headed to Thailand for a week and we will get to spend the 4th of July in Thailand! I am so excited because I expect for it to be more of a celebration there than it is here in the Land of the Not Free at ALL. Then I am back 2 weeks before flying out again...and this time, I am headed home. That's right! For 1 month, I will be returning home to Atlanta. Since I work from home now anyway, I figured why not work from home in the States. I can see my friends and family, breathe some fresh air, do summer stuff, hopefully see my cousin's brand new baby boy, see my other cousin who will be a brand new newlywed and do a little much needed shopping for me, hubs and our home.

Will it be a month's vacation? Nope. I will be working nights. Thankfully since I don't make calls the whole 8 hour work day, I can do some of my work during the day and the rest at night...here is what I am thinking:

1. Wake up and check my emails
2. During the day, do some data entry (2 hours..ish)
3. Work from 8pm-2am (6 hours)

This will probably match up well to the amount I get done here. Then at 2 am I will pass out and probably sleep until 10 or 11. Then I can do what I want and plan my data entry in there somewhere. Splitting this up will probably result in me getting more work done anyway. So really, its a win for me and a win for my company, win win :)

I really need this. China has been wearing on me and my emotional health and even though I will miss hubs so much, I think it will be a good choice for us all. No one benefits from someone moping and acting sad all the time. I could not be more happy in my marriage and I love my friends here, but I miss the rest of my family and my friends at home and I miss AMERICA and familiarity.

Childhood Summers

For those of you who have not been to Mama Kat's website Mama's Losin It , you shoudl quickly remedy that.

She has weekly writing prompts and since my first  instinct was to complain endlessly on my next post (about the smog and my job), I decided instead to spare you my pity party and choose one of her recent writing prompts. (For those of you secretly disappointed that you will be missing me rant about my life, be assured...its only Tuesday...yeah thats when I started writing this and now its Friday)

List your top 10 favorite things about summer growing up

I had a rather atypical youth...not for the first 9 years, but after that... definitely not mainstream. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and went to a nearby Episcopal Elementary School. We lived in a beautiful neighborhood in a custom riverfront house. I had a adorable cat named Mickey and a younger sister who drove me crazy.

When I was 9, my family moved onto our 50 foot sailboat "Nighthawk" and lived at the marina down the street from our house. For 1 year we lived on the boat, getting acclimated. Then we left to sail around the world. For the next 6 years, we would visit sail to 27 countries for mostly short stops with the exception of Australia (1 year) and New Zealand (almost 2 years).

So for this post I will split my 10 favorite things in half. 5 for <9 years old and 5 for >9 years old (the rare math symbols that I remember).

Pre 9:
1. Not having to be in school anymore (The best part...damn I miss having 3 months off in the summer...why is work not like that?)
2. Getting to spend all day out on the water on the boat (Waterskiing, all day)
3. Getting to stay up as late as I wanted (Doesn't every kid like this)
4. Summer birthday parties (always more fun)
5. Kanuga (A family type retreat in North Carolina where we used to spend a week in the summer. In the woods, no TV's, barely any reception, very relaxing...I worked there for a summer in college...never seen more pot smokers in one place)

Post 9:
1. Not having to study (although since we were always on the move, I didn't have the typical 9 months on and 3 months off schedule..more like 11 months on 1 month off)
2. Getting to spend al day with my friends exploring whatever new location we were currently located at

Yeah...that's all I got for years 9-15. When I was 16-18, I loved getting to drive to North Carolina and spend the week with my cousin or spend the whole day out at the beach. I would spend days at my friend Kelsey's house just back and forth from the beach.

-As many of you have probably guessed, I am not a small child in any of my pictures...that is for the sole reason that I am in China and can't access my mothers desktop. Oh well, these are some of my favorite summer pictures. 

Vacation Planning

Plane Tickets: Check

Now...time for everything else. At first I thought we would stay in Phi Phi Don which is about 2 hours from Phuket but then I decided that this choice meant being a 2 hour ferry way from the main island and the airport and meant paying higher prices for everything with no increase (in fact an evident decrease) in the quality of most hotels.

So, we will now be staying in main Phuket and are looking at hotels on Kata Beach

Based on the amount that we want to spend and various views from TripAdvisor, we have decided on The Andaman Cannacia Resort.

It's hard for me to choose hotels from websites like this because I have a tendency to want to read all of the negative reviews. Thankfully, although this hotel did have some negative reviews, most of them were a few years old...and lets be honest, the fact that you could stay in that hotel the years after the tsunami was a blessing anyway...so be real. Almost all of the recent reviews were good and the majority of the reviews were very good (excellent would have been better but we are not really wanting to spend the excellent dollars).

Just a note to anyone looking to travel to Asia, before you book something with any of the regular sites you may visit, look into AsiaWebDirect (where you can also book tickets to anywhere else in the world I just discovered). The prices from this website are SO much better than what I found with Agoda, Booking.com, Hotels.com etc.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the hotel and the room that we booked

View from the room

We went for the more expensive villa section of the resort and chose the Garden Spa room for the precise reason that it has a terrace complete with an outdoor Jacuzzi. We don't take too many vacations, so we feel good about this little splurge because we stayed in Asia.

Excited doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about this vacation

Now all that's left is booking our excursions. We know we want to see Phi Phi Don and James Bond Island and I definitely want to go water skiing (I miss it so much). Hubs also wants to get some surfing lessons so we have a decent amount left to book. Anyone with any excursion ideas for Phuket, please feel free to share!

Proof of busyness

Life as of April is hectic! My husband tells me that I make my world hectic which is crap which may be the case but nevertheless…it is crazy. On the things I can take “credit” for are: changes in the way my family eats and changing anything I can in my environment that will make me healthier and happier.

We have a very American way of eating…meat constantly and not enough fruits and vegetables. Who the hell has time to eat a pound of leafy green vegetables every day? So, as I mentioned before, I have been preparing green smoothies every day. Take a handful of spinach or lettuce or whatever green leafy veggie you have and toss it in the blender with some fruit and any other healthy stuff you have around. Flax seeds, cinnamon, herbs, wheatgrass…whatever floats your boat. The end result varies on what you put in (shocking I know) but for the most part they taste anywhere from good to really yummy. Since this change we have both felt fuller throughout the day, lighter (hard to explain but like we aren’t so heavy) and have both had less cravings. I have been eliminating as much salt from my diet as possible as well as bread, white pasta and meat. I have lost 2 pounds (though I am not trying to lose weight, just be healthier) and my skin has been looking a lot better. I also found the Insanity program and we are going to try to start that! Going to be different…hope our downstairs neighbors don’t complain…I hear there is a lot of jumping jacks and jumping in general….yeah, we’ll see.

Anyway, I started looking into water filters and found a great company, Aquasana, that has a China branch and their filters are specific to the interestingness of Chinese tap water. Filled with Chloramine, it has less of a smell than Chlorine but is a carcinogen…aka causes cancer long term. We don’t ever drink tap water, opting instead to buying tons and tons of bottles of water, but I read that taking one hot shower in Beijing unfiltered water is the same as drinking 4 gallons of tap water…awesome. So, we got a filter for the shower, a filter for the bath and a drinking water filter for the kitchen. It has been great.

                In other news, my husband’s boss’s wife J is a therapist and she works at an international clinic here, which is (shock) international, and has branches in Singapore and New Zealand...and just about everywhere else. She thinks she may be able to get me some work there doing testing! This would give me actual working experience in the counseling field before getting my degree (basically unheard of!). This is in combination with the fact that one of my coworkers has gotten the police interested in the foreigners in our office and I will be working from home until further notice (yeah..now permanent). Seems to me like the perfect time to have a meeting with the boss’s wife about future opportunities.  I got this work at home news upon stepping foot in the office this morning…surprise…turn around and go home.

                Add to this my regular work responsibilities and a full load with classes, and I have been feeling hectic. Does this not sound hectic or does this sound like I overreact and hectify my life?