Thailand - Day 13 (Christmas Day) - Koh Chang

From Koh Chang Island

Christmas morning was beautiful and sunny. We ate breakfast and hung out at the beach most of the day, leaving the resort only for lunch and supper. We decided to treat ourselves to a special Christmas supper and planned to splurge on Mexican (it sounds odd to "splurge" on Mexican but its actually one of the more expensive meals we get over here). So we wandered down to find the restaurant that we had seen earlier. There were actually two places that said they served Mexican food so we just stopped at the first one but when we looked at the menu there were no Mexican dishes on it. We got the waitress to come over and after some broken English attempts she realized what we wanted but said they didn't serve Mexican, the place next door did though. However, rather than having us get up and leave she quickly ran next door to get their menu and brought it to us. Unfortunately, they only offered three dishes (taco, taco salad, and burrito) and I have come to realize my new standards for a "Mexican" restaurant is that it must have a quesadilla on the menu (Eric says his qualification is that it has to have a tamale). By this point we already had our drinks but I remembered seeing another place down the street so I walked down there to see what they had, nothing really so we settled for Thai food in the end, which is actually really good we were just hoping for something different.

Eric ordered some chicken stir fry which came out first but I thought it was mine and started eating it. It wasn't very good but we managed to eat all the chicken and baby corn. I ordered an Isan dish which is evidently a region of Thailand that eats VERY spicy food because when it finally came it was so hot we only ate a few bites of it (and the waiter was watching us to see our reaction). Something was lost in translation because the Enlish description of the meal said it would have peppermint in it. Maybe it did but it was so hot we couldn't really taste anything for a few hours afterwards. Unfortunately my dish came out about 10 minutes after Eric's (and after I had already eaten most of his) so we went to the 7-11 and got a few drinks and candy bars to tide us over until breakfast. So, Christmas dinner was kind of a flop, but it was a new experience.

In order to talk to people back home Eric and I got up at 1 am and called home. There was one "24 hour" Internet place right accross the street but we really didn't want to pay (or to bother the people who owned it since they did actually go to sleep and told us to just wake them up when we needed it). So we huddled on a little stone wall, with our wireless Internet signal, under a street lamp talking to familiy. We talked until the power went dead on the computer (it was only half charged because we didn't have a way to recharge it in our room). We still had people we wanted to talk to though so we tried to find an extension cord near the office of the resort. We knew there had to be something because they had Christmas lights draped on a couple of trees outside. We found the cord coming away from the tree but it wasn't actually a real extention cord, they had somehow rigged and electrical wire coming out of the office. Holding our breaths we plugged the cord into the outlet at the end of the lights and with a brief spark of electricity, our computer was charging.

Since we didn't want to leave the computer outside and since, by this time we were wide awake, we got out the cards and our 1 RMB coins and played poker for an hour while it charged. With another 1/2 full battery we made our way back to the street light and called home again. We got to talk to family and by about 3 o'clock we were exhausted and crashed into bed, a Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!