Thai Heinz

I guess every culture wants its ketchup. This restaurant had both Heinz ketchup and chili sauce on the table. How many languages do you suppose the Heinz label is manufactured in?

Last Night In Thailand

We ate in a little open air place right down from our hotel. We were the only ones in it, save for one couple. Despite the small crowd, there was live entertainment. Our girls thoroughly enjoyed the music, which was mostly American 80's pop music, and I think they made the two marginal singers' evening by dancing with abandon to one number after the next.
The dancing queens!

More Beach

I remember many summer mornings at a little creek near our house in Ohio.... all I had to bring was a bucket and a little fish net and the boys would be happy for literally hours, catching minnows and crayfish. That little boy desire to capture a living thing is still in Caleb. He told me so, on the beach as he watched the waves wash forward and back, revealing sand crabs and little shellfish that he ran to catch before they quickly buried themselves in the wet sand. He got caught up in the chase, so intense and excited, and when he'd catch a little crab, he'd hand it to me to hold while he went after the next one. I loved watching him, seeing the little boy that still lives inside him.


Nap on the beach... doesn't that sound good? Of course Gwen wasn't thrilled about it, but we were all pleased that she did fall asleep while we were out so that we could stay and play while she napped. It worked out this way for her to nap at the pool a couple of days also.There were teeny, tiny jellyfish in the water, about the size of my thumb. They didn't seem to sting at all, just floated along. Here Gwen is holding one up to Scott, although I don't think it's visible in the picture. Playing with friends on the beach... we ran into a family that has their kids attending the same school that Caleb and Seth attend... one of their boys is even in Seth's class! We enjoyed an afternoon chatting with them and playing on the beach. We were actually in Thailand during monsoon season, which made some beaches quite dangerous to swim in. The one closest to our hotel had this sign posted. I was nervous for the kids to go in past their ankles. There were other more sheltered beaches that were safer.

Tuk-Tuk

These funny little trucks are the taxis of Thailand. They really are called tuk-tuks, at least that's how it is said in English. We all had fun riding in them!

Kai Nok Island

There are many small islands around Phuket, which is the large island where we were staying in southern Thailand. After a slow start, we had what turned out to be a great day on a snorkling outing off of Kai Nok island. We took about a 15 minute speedboat ride out to the island. There were so many small, beautiful islands on the way, each like a miniature mountain protruding from the Andaman Sea.

Blown in the wind on the boat ride!

Gwen enjoyed her fried rice and fried egg lunch on the beach. The snorkling company provided the lunch.
The reason we chose this island was because it was advertised as having fish that came up into the shallow water so that even small children could enjoy them. This was certainly true... there were schools of striped and rainbow fish that clustered around in the shallow water. The kids found that if they held a slice of watermelon out in the water, these fish would gather around and nibble at it!


We discovered some little tide pools in these rocks that had little creatures in them. Caleb was bent on trying to capture them.


We snorkled right off of this beach at first, struggling to get masks and snorkles adjusted so that they didn't have water leaking in from everywhere. About an hour after we arrived, the snorkling company took us out into deeper water to snorkle off the boat over a reef. Scott stayed on the beach with the girls so that I could go out with the boys off the boat. My favorite part of it was hearing Seth's muffled exclaimations coming through his snorkle as he saw the wonders below the surface! No underwater pictures, sadly! We were pretty sure we spotted Gill (from Nemo!) and several of his relatives.

Diving In!

The kids had so much fun jumping, twisting, flipping and diving off the diving board at one of the hotel pools. The girls had never been off a diving board before, and it had been a very long time for Caleb and Seth. Trampoline experience served them well, though, and the boys were soon doing flips with ease. Both girls jumped off fearlessly their first time... somehow I remember long hesitations on my part as a child, when faced with the distance between the board and the water. I did just fine this time, though!

Isn't it funny how it looks like Madelyn is crawling over the water in this picture?!
Gwen's classic jumping posture... knees bent like this, same every time. She loved it! Our only sorrow with the fun of the diving board was that Uncle Justin wasn't with us to accelerate the rate at which the children would try increasingly dangerous tricks! Wink, wink.

Tattoos on the Beach

The guys show off their henna tattoos. Don't worry, Nanny, they wear off in about two weeks! I was actually quite surprised that Scott wanted to get one, but it seemed like the thing to do, I guess! Don't they all look pleased?
The "tattoo guy" (do we call him an artist?) transferred the design on to the skin, then traced over it with a little pointed instrument (perhaps a stick!) dipped in henna. The girls both got tattoos also, but I don't have a picture of theirs. Madelyn's is the side view of a little striped cat, and Gwen's is Hello Kitty. Both of them have their tattoos on their ankles. I wasn't really into the tattoo thing, so I guess I'm the odd one out!

Snapshots of Thailand

This little shrine of sorts was on the grounds of our hotel.

Traditional Thai musicians in a restaurant where we had dinner one night.

This picture was taken for us by a friendly stranger after our dinner at a place called "On the Rock", a restaurant that we had to follow many twists and turns of this wooden bridge through what seemed to be rainforest to get up to. It was literally built into a cliff overlooking the shoreline. As seems to be common, the sides of the resaurant were all open to the elements... evidently it is warm enough year round for this to work. It allowed the sounds of the Andaman Sea to drift right in, providing wonderful dinner music! The lobby of our hotel was this way also, not enclosed.

This was the uniform for the traffic police. Not sure what this large nut was, but it appeared to have fallen from the palm trees near the beach. Coconut?

Loved these flowering trees. Anyone know what they are called?

Before We Leave

The hotel room is almost quiet, except for the whispers of one little girl who is the only one of the six of us who had a nap today. We are all trying to grab a couple of hours of sleep before we get up in the middle of the night to catch our 3:45 a.m. flight back to Shanghai. We've been playing on the beach in Thailand for the last few days, during the Chinese National Day week-long holiday, and it's been such a treat. I'm hoping to post some pictures once we get home tomorrow, but right now that seems a long way off!