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Monday 13th September - Phuket
By Claire
Wednesday, 15th September 2004 10:52

I was still feeling dozy and drowsy so we'd decided on another gentle day. We went to the post office this time, spent about an hour there and managed to send two boxes home - things like clothes we don't need, and some photos. It was 7 kilos of stuff and the flat-packed post office boxes were so confusing that the man at the counter had to help.

It was raining a bit which might have made it cooler, but I couldn't tell. We took some books to a book exchange, checked our mail (Mikey spent hours getting ready to burn photos onto a CD but the cafe people decided that they didn't actually have a CD burner after all) and popped into a Chinese-Thai restaurant for a quick snack. Which was never going to happen: I can't resist ordering food - I just want to see what it looks like. So we had four or five dishes and we weren't hungry for the rest of the day. Then I went back to sleep, Mikey read downstairs for a while, and the afternoon passed.

When it was dark we went to find my pancake man but he told me he didn't have any today. I was very disappointed but I soon found another stand. The old man here seemed amused by my fascination and slowed the actions down a bit so I could see. This caused a bunch of giggling girls behind us to say something and I turned round to them in surprise because I understood roughly what they said - that the man was showng off for the foreigners. They seemed embarassed that I'd understood but I laughed and they giggled and the man said something that was either 'You come and have a go, then,' or 'Are you going to buy a pancake?' and the whole group laughed and backed off. It was quite funny. So we took our pancakes and wandered through town and eventually found ourselves back at the hostel.

Against my better judgement, I'd started reading another Dan Brown book. They annoy me intensely and I gave up on the last one when I got to 100 pages and Mikey said I'd predicted the ending well enough for me not to have to finish it. I'd guessed the baddy and a couple of plot twists by page 8 on this one, but obviously not enough for Mikey to let me stop. I ended up reading the whole thing but this is the last one. The guy is so condescending, thinking he's so clever, he has a very well-used formula for writing all his stories so that in effect they're all the same and his characters, who are supposed to be the best in their fields in the world can barely solve riddles that I get the moment they appear, and I'm not a symbologist, physicist, cryptographer or whatever. It ANNOYS me. So I'm not going to read any more.

And that was it, really. I'm feeling mostly better and we're off to Bangkok in the morning.



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