Party in Pattaya!
-Our first weekend away-
We finished our first week of teaching. We quite literally got thrown into our classrooms to fend for ourselves, find teaching supplies navigate our ginormous school all while adjusting to a new climate, environment, town, etc. What was most abrupt about all of this change is the very fact that this was our new home, after all that time and preparation and we were now full time, English Teachers. It honestly felt like the longest week of my entire life. I caught wind that our friends from orientation already missed each other on one of our Facebook group messages, and then I caught a glimpse of a link. Our friend Tom had found a huge villa in a beach town just 4 hours east of us with enough beds for 30 people, a pool and a beautiful kitchen. My friends immediately began to RSVP and I jumped on it. Before I knew it there were 30 of us friends committed to the beach town of Pattaya for our first weekend of travel. I was ecstatic. We couldn't wait to get out of school after that first Friday. But here lies one problem. We have no idea how to navigate the public transportation system in Thailand at all whatsoever.
-Public Transportation-
Emily Shawnda and I, are fortunate to have amazing co-teachers, ones that will get out of bed and give you medicine when you are ill, or physically bring you to the hospital, local clinic, local market if you need anything, food medicine, a doctor. Its pretty amazing that we have this, and it definitely co-insides with the Thai culture. We sat at Lunch on Thursday with four other foreign teachers voice recording their Thai directions and writing down every single step it would take for us to take the local bus to the Train station where you could find cheap vans to get you to Pattaya by 9 pm on Friday. Needless to say we were overwhelmed. Two hours before departing on Friday, a Teacher who has taught at the school already for 6 months agreed to join as as there was one more opening in our house! This was a saving grace for us because she has learned to navigate transportation, speaks English and is also our friend. The reason I bring this up because Emily, Thank you Emily saved our butts this weekend. She not only helped us sort out the bus system i.e, not taking the wrong one in the wrong direction, as well as helped us not panic when we realized that the last van to Pattaya had already departed for the evening, and thereafter bartering with a Taxi driver to give us a very reasonable price for for a Taxi all the way to Pattaya. Dramatics aside, thank you Emily for saving our lives and allowing us to begin our very first weekend away in Thailand and arrive in one piece.
We arrived in Pattaya at 9pm Friday November 10th, with overpacked luggage (something you will see in future posts stops happening) to find our friends laying by lit up pool in front of our Giant villa. Our best friend Meghan whom you will see mentioned in much of my future posts greeted us with her big warm hug and infectious smile and quickly herded us upstairs to get first choice at the remaining studio lofts that made up this 3 story modern apartment style air b and b. We found a lofted apartment on the top floor of our building complete with a fridge, stove top, a view of our villa pool, a microwave and most importantly, a SHOWER WITH HOT WATER. As you will notice, and I mentioned before, I am not sorry for accentuating the words I am particularly excited about. A hot shower is a dime a dozen over hear. You better believe that we took advantage of our shower over the weekend and maybe ran out of hot water a few times, understandably so. We felt like celebrities. I want you all to know that we did pay a lot for the Air B and B, well a lot meaning 40 bucks for the weekend. To offer a comparison, we found a very similar housing situation through air b and b for our upcoming Christmas break, 37 dollars a head for 7 full days. Essentially this was our 'we deserve this, we made it through the first week of teaching' spending spree. The next several hours were spent dancing, catching up with friends from orientation and taking a 15 person Songtheaw into downtown Pattaya, a street much like Khao San Bangkok called Walking Street, with bars, clubs, prostitution. You know, the usual. One thing we did learn during this trip was that Pattaya, is that this city is the Prostitution capital of Thailand. Something we weren't super fond of having to run into left and right and having to blindly accept. We were warned about this beforehand, but we assumed just the same as any busy city this is something that you learn to look past. Otherwise the night life was very fun, crazy loud lights open until early hours in the morning and of course complete with a number of 7/11 stores and McDonalds for all of our early morning needs aka water, electrolytes, food. You know, the essentials.
-Island Time-
One shout out I would like to give it to my people out here. We have now traveled together a total of four weekends and we have stuck to every plan that we have made, even if that means getting up to hike at 6 am in Kanchanaburi after going to bed at 3 am. Similarly, we went to bed around 4 in the morning early Saturday morning, and awoke to our friend Meghan's wake up call alerting us of the last ferry leaving for a local island Kho Lan in approximately 15 minutes. So what happened? All 30 of us got our butts up out of bed changed into island attire whatever that may be packed our bags and were out the door running to the nearest Song Thew in exactly 15 minutes. It is amazing that we all made it on the ferry this day. I have to thank my friends for picking one another up, helping each other pack and gently pushing one another out the door. I think this has to do with the very fact that we all traveled halfway around the world to see everything that we could and don't want to miss a minute of it. For this I am extremely lucky. I know at home I would be moaning to wake up feeling pressured to be out the door in 15 minutes and press snooze. But there is just something about Thailand that keeps you going!
We made the ferry in the nick of time, spending forty minutes on board hydrating and trying not to get sea sick at the same time taking in the view. The water in Pattaya isn't quite as lovely as the water towards the local islands. All of the sudden, the water turned crystal blue and the sky opened up sun ahead and worries behind us. I remember feeling for the very first time as though I was exactly where I needed to be. When I pictured myself in Thailand, I pictured the students the schools and the difficulties but I weighed out the times in which I could be at peace with myself with the ocean breeze blowing on my face and the water near. This was it. This is what I was searching for, and I felt so unbelievably grateful for the people I surrounded with and the opportunity to live and teach in a country with such amazing destinations. We landed at the pier and immediately made our way towards a shack with drinks in coconuts in pineapples because why not? What kind of girls would be be if we didn't proceed to lose all of the boys in our group who don't care about photo taking and continue to pose for an extra 45 minutes with the so pretty they are almost fake backdrops we have encountered. You see, girls know how to do it. We savor simple moments like drinking out of a pineapple because we know that we won't get many opportunities to do so. I think we are smarter in that way but don't take any offense to that boys. We do however, care about how cute we look with the pineapple in hand and I'm sorry I won't apologize for that because we are cute, and so are pineapples. So, Here's to Pineapples in Pattaya.
Once we absorbed every tourist moment that we could, we wanted to get away from the money traps and travel elsewhere on the island, we made our way towards a group of Song Thews and chose the beach of our choice on the island bartering with the cost, something I have gotten very proud of since arriving in Thailand. (I hope that makes you proud Mom)- She is the queen of bartering. Chose to travel to a small, desolate beach called Tien Beach, all the way on the other side of the island. The beach had white sands, a tiki hut for drinks where we could refill our coconuts and a handful of beachside restaurants in the sand with amazing food. We stopped to eat and while we waited for our food to be ready, we went for a swim in the waves. The water was perfect. The waves, rolling and gentle and warm. I could have stayed in their all day. With a big group of friends on this island beach laying in the waves ordering food and drinks that cost 1/8 what they would in America, It almost felt surreal. I was at peace.
-Warning: Sentimental Tangent-
Serene moments like this make me reflect on the moments that lead me up to pure happiness. In the past year, I had lost three very important people to me and my family, gone through a pretty harsh break up, tore my ACL and LCL leaving me unable to work for the few months leading up to this trip short of money and also grieving the losses my family endured as well as moving out of a city I loved and taking a chance to move across the world. I was very scared of what life was throwing at me, feeling like I couldn't catch my breath. On top of it all, I had major issues as previously mentioned in my planning post with insurance companies, rehabilitation and the Visa process that would allow me to move across the world. On a brighter note, I also look back on the amount I accomplished in one year. I had finally completed graduate school, my biggest feat yet. I was hired at McLean Hospital as a Group Therapist, a job I could dream of, I had amazing friends, some of my patients from Dana Farber beat Cancer and I was finally comfortable in the city I loved most Boston. Its a great feeling knowing you belong in a city and that you have a future there. This all came to me within my last year of graduate school through hard work and opportunity. I am very grateful for the life laid out in front of me, the one I have put many years of dedication towards. For this very moment, I realized that It is okay to take a break and soul search. It is okay to move across the world and challenge yourself, It is okay that you still get homesick and you need to rely on those around you to get by. This is life, and life treats you with a beautiful beach and a whole new life if you live every moment to the fullest. This is what peace feels like. Its okay to accept that life is one big beautiful mess.
-Back to Pattaya-
This day was over and we spent the rest of the day laying in one large cuddle puddle on a few beds that we pushed together while ordering pizza like we were back in the states. What I have noticed about my eating styles here is, when Im really exhausted and I mean exhausted like on the verge of crying and want to lay in fetal position, the one thing that really helps is American Food. Luckily, the American food that is accessible to us happens to be Mc Donalds , Burger King, KFC and Pizza Company. May I say that I have NEVER been so grateful for fast food in my entire life. It is terrible that I am admitting to this but I splurge almost every weekend we go to a tourist area on one of the above. And you know what, Im sorry Im not sorry. Rice just gets old sometimes and you can only have so much Pad Thai. Anyways tangent aside, we played cards, ate pizza and then went out to Walking Street for one last wild Kareoke night. Might I say It was magical.
On our last day in Pattaya, we admitted that we needed to sight see since we had mostly relaxed all weekend and decided to catch a Songteaw with our 15 friends to the "Temple of Truth" about an hour outside of Pattaya. This Songthaew was tough but impressively so, all of us got our butts out of bed drank our electrolytes and at our Toasty Sandwiches and continued our days, headaches aside. Throughout my travels since this first weekend, this temple had the most expensive entrance fee yet. It was 500 Bhat to enter the premise. Now that is only 16 US Dollars but every other state park only ranges from 200 to 300 Bhat. I will add however, this temple is one of the most beautiful I have seen yet. Perched on the waters edge, this temple is hidden by a jungle forest and surrounded by water. The temple itself is made entirely of wood, making the architecture even more of a revel. The temple itself is filled with sculptures based on traditional Budhhist and Hindu Motifs. We had to wear hard helmets for safety and cover our entire body upon entering the temple to show respect. The building itself appeared structurally sound but the amount of construction needed to keep this temple in one piece is most likely where all the entry costs come from. We spent an hour in the temple in awe. The view was breathtaking. There were wooden elephants carved into the side of the building that were particularly intriguing to me, and we spent the afternoon eating lunch in a restaurant on a cliff facing the temple itself. I would say that regardless of the cost, this Temple was amazing to experience. One thing that bummed me out was the Elephant on the grounds that appeared to be particularly emaciated, and unhappy. They offer Elephant rides around the campus which seems attractive to the tourist eye, yet after looking closely you can see that this beautiful animals are treated poorly. I did not show pictures out of respect for the animals and my love for them. This experience made me extremely excited for Elephant Sanctuaries in the future that protects and nourishes these animals. I promised myself I would never lay a finger on an Elephant unless it was treated properly. This includes no Elephant Safaris and no Zoos. Out of respect for the sacred animal and its history, I vow to dedicate a part of my trip to helping not hurting the lovely creatures. All in all, Pattaya was a town to experience atleast once. It is both beautiful and full of tourists. My experiences with my friends are something I would never take back and for our first weekend away, I would consider this weekend a major success! With little hiccups considering this was the first time traveling on our own.
We finished our first week of teaching. We quite literally got thrown into our classrooms to fend for ourselves, find teaching supplies navigate our ginormous school all while adjusting to a new climate, environment, town, etc. What was most abrupt about all of this change is the very fact that this was our new home, after all that time and preparation and we were now full time, English Teachers. It honestly felt like the longest week of my entire life. I caught wind that our friends from orientation already missed each other on one of our Facebook group messages, and then I caught a glimpse of a link. Our friend Tom had found a huge villa in a beach town just 4 hours east of us with enough beds for 30 people, a pool and a beautiful kitchen. My friends immediately began to RSVP and I jumped on it. Before I knew it there were 30 of us friends committed to the beach town of Pattaya for our first weekend of travel. I was ecstatic. We couldn't wait to get out of school after that first Friday. But here lies one problem. We have no idea how to navigate the public transportation system in Thailand at all whatsoever.
-Public Transportation-
Emily Shawnda and I, are fortunate to have amazing co-teachers, ones that will get out of bed and give you medicine when you are ill, or physically bring you to the hospital, local clinic, local market if you need anything, food medicine, a doctor. Its pretty amazing that we have this, and it definitely co-insides with the Thai culture. We sat at Lunch on Thursday with four other foreign teachers voice recording their Thai directions and writing down every single step it would take for us to take the local bus to the Train station where you could find cheap vans to get you to Pattaya by 9 pm on Friday. Needless to say we were overwhelmed. Two hours before departing on Friday, a Teacher who has taught at the school already for 6 months agreed to join as as there was one more opening in our house! This was a saving grace for us because she has learned to navigate transportation, speaks English and is also our friend. The reason I bring this up because Emily, Thank you Emily saved our butts this weekend. She not only helped us sort out the bus system i.e, not taking the wrong one in the wrong direction, as well as helped us not panic when we realized that the last van to Pattaya had already departed for the evening, and thereafter bartering with a Taxi driver to give us a very reasonable price for for a Taxi all the way to Pattaya. Dramatics aside, thank you Emily for saving our lives and allowing us to begin our very first weekend away in Thailand and arrive in one piece.
We arrived in Pattaya at 9pm Friday November 10th, with overpacked luggage (something you will see in future posts stops happening) to find our friends laying by lit up pool in front of our Giant villa. Our best friend Meghan whom you will see mentioned in much of my future posts greeted us with her big warm hug and infectious smile and quickly herded us upstairs to get first choice at the remaining studio lofts that made up this 3 story modern apartment style air b and b. We found a lofted apartment on the top floor of our building complete with a fridge, stove top, a view of our villa pool, a microwave and most importantly, a SHOWER WITH HOT WATER. As you will notice, and I mentioned before, I am not sorry for accentuating the words I am particularly excited about. A hot shower is a dime a dozen over hear. You better believe that we took advantage of our shower over the weekend and maybe ran out of hot water a few times, understandably so. We felt like celebrities. I want you all to know that we did pay a lot for the Air B and B, well a lot meaning 40 bucks for the weekend. To offer a comparison, we found a very similar housing situation through air b and b for our upcoming Christmas break, 37 dollars a head for 7 full days. Essentially this was our 'we deserve this, we made it through the first week of teaching' spending spree. The next several hours were spent dancing, catching up with friends from orientation and taking a 15 person Songtheaw into downtown Pattaya, a street much like Khao San Bangkok called Walking Street, with bars, clubs, prostitution. You know, the usual. One thing we did learn during this trip was that Pattaya, is that this city is the Prostitution capital of Thailand. Something we weren't super fond of having to run into left and right and having to blindly accept. We were warned about this beforehand, but we assumed just the same as any busy city this is something that you learn to look past. Otherwise the night life was very fun, crazy loud lights open until early hours in the morning and of course complete with a number of 7/11 stores and McDonalds for all of our early morning needs aka water, electrolytes, food. You know, the essentials.
-Island Time-
One shout out I would like to give it to my people out here. We have now traveled together a total of four weekends and we have stuck to every plan that we have made, even if that means getting up to hike at 6 am in Kanchanaburi after going to bed at 3 am. Similarly, we went to bed around 4 in the morning early Saturday morning, and awoke to our friend Meghan's wake up call alerting us of the last ferry leaving for a local island Kho Lan in approximately 15 minutes. So what happened? All 30 of us got our butts up out of bed changed into island attire whatever that may be packed our bags and were out the door running to the nearest Song Thew in exactly 15 minutes. It is amazing that we all made it on the ferry this day. I have to thank my friends for picking one another up, helping each other pack and gently pushing one another out the door. I think this has to do with the very fact that we all traveled halfway around the world to see everything that we could and don't want to miss a minute of it. For this I am extremely lucky. I know at home I would be moaning to wake up feeling pressured to be out the door in 15 minutes and press snooze. But there is just something about Thailand that keeps you going!
We made the ferry in the nick of time, spending forty minutes on board hydrating and trying not to get sea sick at the same time taking in the view. The water in Pattaya isn't quite as lovely as the water towards the local islands. All of the sudden, the water turned crystal blue and the sky opened up sun ahead and worries behind us. I remember feeling for the very first time as though I was exactly where I needed to be. When I pictured myself in Thailand, I pictured the students the schools and the difficulties but I weighed out the times in which I could be at peace with myself with the ocean breeze blowing on my face and the water near. This was it. This is what I was searching for, and I felt so unbelievably grateful for the people I surrounded with and the opportunity to live and teach in a country with such amazing destinations. We landed at the pier and immediately made our way towards a shack with drinks in coconuts in pineapples because why not? What kind of girls would be be if we didn't proceed to lose all of the boys in our group who don't care about photo taking and continue to pose for an extra 45 minutes with the so pretty they are almost fake backdrops we have encountered. You see, girls know how to do it. We savor simple moments like drinking out of a pineapple because we know that we won't get many opportunities to do so. I think we are smarter in that way but don't take any offense to that boys. We do however, care about how cute we look with the pineapple in hand and I'm sorry I won't apologize for that because we are cute, and so are pineapples. So, Here's to Pineapples in Pattaya.
Once we absorbed every tourist moment that we could, we wanted to get away from the money traps and travel elsewhere on the island, we made our way towards a group of Song Thews and chose the beach of our choice on the island bartering with the cost, something I have gotten very proud of since arriving in Thailand. (I hope that makes you proud Mom)- She is the queen of bartering. Chose to travel to a small, desolate beach called Tien Beach, all the way on the other side of the island. The beach had white sands, a tiki hut for drinks where we could refill our coconuts and a handful of beachside restaurants in the sand with amazing food. We stopped to eat and while we waited for our food to be ready, we went for a swim in the waves. The water was perfect. The waves, rolling and gentle and warm. I could have stayed in their all day. With a big group of friends on this island beach laying in the waves ordering food and drinks that cost 1/8 what they would in America, It almost felt surreal. I was at peace.
-Warning: Sentimental Tangent-
Serene moments like this make me reflect on the moments that lead me up to pure happiness. In the past year, I had lost three very important people to me and my family, gone through a pretty harsh break up, tore my ACL and LCL leaving me unable to work for the few months leading up to this trip short of money and also grieving the losses my family endured as well as moving out of a city I loved and taking a chance to move across the world. I was very scared of what life was throwing at me, feeling like I couldn't catch my breath. On top of it all, I had major issues as previously mentioned in my planning post with insurance companies, rehabilitation and the Visa process that would allow me to move across the world. On a brighter note, I also look back on the amount I accomplished in one year. I had finally completed graduate school, my biggest feat yet. I was hired at McLean Hospital as a Group Therapist, a job I could dream of, I had amazing friends, some of my patients from Dana Farber beat Cancer and I was finally comfortable in the city I loved most Boston. Its a great feeling knowing you belong in a city and that you have a future there. This all came to me within my last year of graduate school through hard work and opportunity. I am very grateful for the life laid out in front of me, the one I have put many years of dedication towards. For this very moment, I realized that It is okay to take a break and soul search. It is okay to move across the world and challenge yourself, It is okay that you still get homesick and you need to rely on those around you to get by. This is life, and life treats you with a beautiful beach and a whole new life if you live every moment to the fullest. This is what peace feels like. Its okay to accept that life is one big beautiful mess.
-Back to Pattaya-
This day was over and we spent the rest of the day laying in one large cuddle puddle on a few beds that we pushed together while ordering pizza like we were back in the states. What I have noticed about my eating styles here is, when Im really exhausted and I mean exhausted like on the verge of crying and want to lay in fetal position, the one thing that really helps is American Food. Luckily, the American food that is accessible to us happens to be Mc Donalds , Burger King, KFC and Pizza Company. May I say that I have NEVER been so grateful for fast food in my entire life. It is terrible that I am admitting to this but I splurge almost every weekend we go to a tourist area on one of the above. And you know what, Im sorry Im not sorry. Rice just gets old sometimes and you can only have so much Pad Thai. Anyways tangent aside, we played cards, ate pizza and then went out to Walking Street for one last wild Kareoke night. Might I say It was magical.
On our last day in Pattaya, we admitted that we needed to sight see since we had mostly relaxed all weekend and decided to catch a Songteaw with our 15 friends to the "Temple of Truth" about an hour outside of Pattaya. This Songthaew was tough but impressively so, all of us got our butts out of bed drank our electrolytes and at our Toasty Sandwiches and continued our days, headaches aside. Throughout my travels since this first weekend, this temple had the most expensive entrance fee yet. It was 500 Bhat to enter the premise. Now that is only 16 US Dollars but every other state park only ranges from 200 to 300 Bhat. I will add however, this temple is one of the most beautiful I have seen yet. Perched on the waters edge, this temple is hidden by a jungle forest and surrounded by water. The temple itself is made entirely of wood, making the architecture even more of a revel. The temple itself is filled with sculptures based on traditional Budhhist and Hindu Motifs. We had to wear hard helmets for safety and cover our entire body upon entering the temple to show respect. The building itself appeared structurally sound but the amount of construction needed to keep this temple in one piece is most likely where all the entry costs come from. We spent an hour in the temple in awe. The view was breathtaking. There were wooden elephants carved into the side of the building that were particularly intriguing to me, and we spent the afternoon eating lunch in a restaurant on a cliff facing the temple itself. I would say that regardless of the cost, this Temple was amazing to experience. One thing that bummed me out was the Elephant on the grounds that appeared to be particularly emaciated, and unhappy. They offer Elephant rides around the campus which seems attractive to the tourist eye, yet after looking closely you can see that this beautiful animals are treated poorly. I did not show pictures out of respect for the animals and my love for them. This experience made me extremely excited for Elephant Sanctuaries in the future that protects and nourishes these animals. I promised myself I would never lay a finger on an Elephant unless it was treated properly. This includes no Elephant Safaris and no Zoos. Out of respect for the sacred animal and its history, I vow to dedicate a part of my trip to helping not hurting the lovely creatures. All in all, Pattaya was a town to experience atleast once. It is both beautiful and full of tourists. My experiences with my friends are something I would never take back and for our first weekend away, I would consider this weekend a major success! With little hiccups considering this was the first time traveling on our own.
-Tips for Pattaya-
- Go to the island beaches, the beaches in Pattaya are not very clean
- Take the ferry to Kho Lan, it is only 30 Bhat and a half hour long!
- Catch SongThaews for bigger groups as they are much more affordable than taxis
- Walking street is the capital for prostitution so be very aware of the soliciting and also general energy of the city itself
- You can complete everything you plan to do in Pattaya in a matter of two days
- There are beautiful resorts and restaurants here but not many markets or cultural experiences to be had
- Pattaya is a good get away from Bangkok for a beach weekend!
- Take vans to get to Pattaya because it is so close to Bangkok, the fair will be cheaper
- Drinks out are expensive so stick to 7/11 for drinks before heading out if you are looking to save money
- Pattaya is a lot of fun with a big group!
-Day trip to Kho Lan-
The Temple of Truth
Tamnak Villa Air B and B
I would recommend this villa to anyone who is looking for a big group to stay in Pattaya for a weekend. The price can be split by many and still be extremely affordable. There were more beds than we thought, and the Host made us breakfast on the last morning of our stay! Link Below:
Tamnak Villa: Air B and B
Until next time!
xx Samantha Jane
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