Welp, we finally got to leave Hat Yai on May 10 (Stephan’s birthday). I hope in the long run it was a great birthday for him, but I think on the actual day, he was wishing any other day be his birthday. We had to be ready to leave at 6 am. The agency was to take us to Nakhon Si Thammarat, show us our school, introduce us to the other teachers at the school, and take us to look for accommodation until we were happy. Only about one of those happened. We were downstairs with our mountainous pile of luggage at 5:50 sharp. We decided we had some time to spare, so we decided to treat Stephan with a birthday cafe yen (iced coffee). Luckily we were successful in finding a place open. We hurried our selves back to the hotel to make sure we didn’t get left. There was no need for our hurrying. We waited for about an hour and a guy that we met once, who spoke very little English, scooped our bags up (well tried to…mine was too heavy for him, which was my worry from the beginning of this adventure). Thais are too tiny to carry my massive suitcase. Anyways we hopped in the van ready to find out where we would be living, eating, sleeping, walking, riding, teaching, meeting, travelling, etc. We had to make a pit stop at the “British home” to scoop up two Scottish girls, Kirsten and Julie, and an English girl, Annie. I now know that these ladies are so lovely (as they would say). We all exchanged “hellos” and “nice to meet yous” and carried off back into our sleepy state. The drive to Nakhon Si Thammarat lasted about 3 hours. We made it to Annie’s school and dropped her off. The van then took the four of us to Benjama, the school we were being placed at. The van drove us on to campus and the Thai guy in broken English told us “this your school”. He never told us the name or anything. We were on the campus for less than a minute and then drove right off. We didn’t meet a single soul. OH I forgot to mention we were “smartly” dressed meaning we were in dresses and Stephan was in dress pants and a shirt ready to meet teachers and students. We were told that we would not be teaching until May 21st. Well I was happy we had some time to settle, but that was almost two weeks of more waiting! We then went to find accommodation. This consisted of the van driving around looking for places with vacancy and then dumping us off at a hotel and saying that we would find something at the end of the month, or we would need to talk to teachers at our school to find a place to live. We picked the agency thinking that they would find us homes, a place to work right away, and they would basically hold our hands until we were settled. NONE OF THAT HAPPENED. We set our luggage in the rooms and decided to see what the town had to offer for food. We luckily found a cute place nearby with Thai and Vietnamese food with an ENGLISH menu. We scarfed food down and then began worrying about what we would do next. Stephan and I were plotting ideas of leaving the agency and looking for new jobs. Only problem was, we were stuck with all of our luggage. We decided to stop worrying and celebrate Stephan’s birthday. We went out with our new friends to a yummy dinner and later we met up with a big group of “farangs” (foreigners) at a nearby bar and restaurant. The people we met helped ease our worries a bit about being dumped in this strange town, but we also learned that we came about a month too late to find housing, furniture and transportation. SHOOT! Our new friends, Stephan and I decided if we were paying for a hotel in Nakhon, we might as well pay for a hotel on some exotic island instead. To get away from the stress and worries about what was happening with our decision to pick up and move to the other side of the world, we decided to do what we came here for: travel and adventure.
POST SCRIPT: We still did not even know the name of the town we were in. The agency, I guess, assumed we would be able to figure that one out, since we read Thai and all.
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