Today, we both agree, has been a day of many successes. Tired of just laying about and going swimming, we decided to head into town today and get things done. We started with an el-cheapo cell phone ($40 moto incl sim card). Wait, no, we started with our first bike trip into Thongsala, which was pretty uneventful but marked the beginning of Sarah’s acceptance of the motorbike way of life. We discovered gas costs about the same here as in Vic, but obviously the bikes use much less of it.
We plowed ahead and signed up for our satellite internet connection which should be setup in a few days. Colin connected with a local kite surfing instructor and is lined up to have his first lesson tomorrow. We bought more clothes, found a bakery that made multigrain and rye breads (most places have only these wonderbread-esque white loaves), had a nice lunch (Colin had an entire curried crab for $7 while I had a more typical $2.50 prawn & mushroom stirfry), picked up our clothes from the local laundry, found the (closed) post office, and bought a clock featuring the regent from a “10 baht super sale” that had set up in an empty lot and was blaring a Thai rendition of some pop song I couldn’t quite name.
See: such successes! We got some books along the way too. Colin is reading “Nightmare in Laos”, and I, having actually finished the shlock southern detective novel we got free with our last round of book-buying, will be starting in to a Terry Pratchet.
We also bought a book on local shells allowing us to identify the purple sea snail we saw floating in the water earlier. It turns out it spends its entire adult life floating on the surface of the water like that, hoping to bump into something it can latch onto and eat. It makes the raft of bubbles to keep it afloat and just goes wherever the wind and tide take it. Some other shells and floating nuts I’ve found on our beach (including moon snails!):
