เกาะ (koh tao)

    So as I have said before finding the motivation to keep writing blog posts is getting harder and harder as my life here turns to routine, and everything in Thailand starts to become everyday normal stuff. But I'll try to keep it up. This month I'm sorry to say I only have one update, but it will be a good one. So... This last week I went on vacation (I know, I'm in Thailand. You would think that was vacation enough.) The family that is hosting me found out that my birthday and the two other exchange students' birthdays are all with in a three month period of each other. They decided to give the three of us a nice trip to an island close to Bangkok, called เกาะ (koh tao). I won't even try to explain what anything looks like; I will just leave it all up to the pictures..

      First we left Udon Thani (my cit) on an overnight train to Bangkok, and I had to sleep on a top bunk. Let me just say that if I was a few inches taller and a little bit more overweight then I would not have fit.

The website is still not letting me rotate pictures. If you rotate this one left you  will see my friend Joao  on the top bunk sleeping away.

   Once we reached Bangkok we had a few hours before we boarded the eight hour bus to the place where we were to get on a ferry. In that time we went to the big mall (mostly window shopping), and we relaxed at the house of my host mom's sister. At the mall we got an interesting experience...

We went to a fish spa!!!

I hope you can see all the little fish, but let me just tell you it was something everyone should try at least once.

Here is my picture to prove that I have tried it...

    Then we went to the bus pick-up point, and found that after we had checked in we had another two hour wait. Luck for us there was a "walking street" (basically a market on the street) very near. We walked the whole street, found some cool stuff, and then found a nice coffee shop to wait the rest of the time.

The many different clothing and item sellers along the street, but this was only part of the "walking street".

    Finally it came time to board the bus, and we headed off on another overnight trip. We finally got to the port for the ferry really early in the morning, and we found out we had another wait ahead of us.

The bus ride. As you\can see some of us were pretty tired.

    After the last weight (of mostly naps) we finally got to board the ferry and take another two hour trip to the island, but once we reached the island all the traveling and waiting we well worth it.

Getting on the boat... 

The trip over (after it had stopped raining)

One of the smaller islands that surrounded the main island.

    The first day we got there in the early afternoon, so we checked into our resort/hotel and walked to the beach. We basically relaxed the whole day and went out for a nice dinner afterword.

The water on the beach was really shallow for like fifty meters or more away from the beach.

And it was so clear you could see the bottom almost anywhere.

The three exchange students with our host mom.

These three ladies are my host mom (left) and her two high school friends. The one on the right lives on the island, while the one in the middle lives in Bangkok and set up the whole trip.

     The next day we woke up at an easy time, and we headed to the most famous part. The place was not connected to the main island, but was made up of three smaller islands. We spent the whole day there. We got to relax, play a little American football, and snorkel. It was amazing! That night we ate barbecue on the beach, and we went for a little walk and saw fire!

No we can't walk on water, but we did our best to make it look like we could.

The water was so clear, we did most of our snorkeling right there.

Get ready for the throw....

And there it goes... I hope somebody was ready to catch it...

The island had a nice relax space...

We all finally got tired, and we decided to head back...

That's right, a fire twirler. He was pretty good and even broke out double sticks a little bit later.

     After what seemed like a long weekend (even though it was only two nights and three days) we headed back home. The trip back took just as long and was just as entertaining as the trip to the island. I won't bore you with recap of the trip back, since all you basically have to do is take what I said about the trip here an reverse it. But once I got home I was really tired, and I just recuperated the whole day... I hope you all enjoy the pictures and details. Please keep on looking for my next update.