Day Two Koh Phangan

On our second day at Koh Phangan I just relaxed. It was great. I decided to take a swim in the ocean even though people were getting stung by jellyfish. I decided to wait and go out when I saw people further out in the water because I figure the jellyfish would get them first and I would have sufficient warning to get out of the water.

In the evening the hotel owners had a big seafood barbecue at the outdoor restaurant/lobby/hangout.

After the barbecue, some of the locals decided to do some fire dancing. They were not professionals and there was a lot of flaming sticks flying into the crowd. That was the real entertainment. Then they started letting the drunk tourists give it a try!

It was exciting to watch at first, but honestly, it got boring after about 15 minutes. the kindergarten teacher and I decided to go back and watch a horribly bootlegged copy of Bridget Jones' Diary 2 that looked like it had been taped in a movie theater.

At the end of the movie, the animal kingdom decided to invade our room. First I noticed weird leaf looking things on the wall, except one of them was walking. It was directly over my bed. Then we saw a gecko dart under the bed. I normally would just try to ignore the gecko, but all I could do is imagine it going over to eat the leaf bugs on the wall over my bed and the gecko and the bugs all falling in my mouth as I slept. How hard can catching a gecko be? I decided to move the bed in an attempt to catch it. As soon as he was exposed to light, the gecko darted behind another piece of furniture and I lost my nerve. I just jumped on to my bed and yelled while the kindergarten teacher went to the door and yelled for some of the other tour group to come help us. A guy and girl came in and I decided to hide in the bathroom which has a full length window to watch the main room out of. I watched as both of them tried and failed to catch it for several minutes as I stood in the bathtub looking through the window. The kindergarten teacher kept her distance. Finally they caught it and took it outside. I came out of the bathroom to thank them, and decided I was able to get to bed, I would just move my bed away from the wall so the leaf bugs didn't land on it.

Before bed, I went to the bathroom and as I was leaving, between me and the door stood the worlds largest cockroach, or at least the biggest one I'd ever seen. I've only seen 2 or 3 in my life and never indoors. So I was back in the bathtub banging on the window screaming at the kindergarten teacher that I couldn't get out of the bathroom because of a giant cockroach. Luckily, the kindergarten teacher is from DC. This is a common occurrence over there. She flipped it on its back and tossed a toilet paper cover over it and said, "We'll leave that for housekeeping." Nobody touched that toilet paper cover for the rest of our stay.