After checking in and catching a quick nap, we headed over to Mai Kaidee's for some lunch. Here's the bananas and black rice covered in coconut milk that we got for dessert! Yum!
After getting our accommodations all set, we hit a nearby restaurant for a late lunch and a few tropical drinks! Meredith went with the nacho platter...
...and I got a FRENCH FRY SANDWICH! (Man, how has this not caught on here in the States yet either? I'm going to open a shop in NYC that only sells French Fry Sandwiches and Raspberry Bacardi Breezers and make a million dollars!)
The highlight of our day was the awesome Indian restaurant we went to for lunch. I spent the rest of the day hiding out in our bungalow reading and watching bad HBO movies on TV. (Hey, they were playing Police Academy 5, which I had never seen! What'd you expect me to do, walk around in the rain?)
After the movie, we went back to the vegetarian restaurant we'd eaten at the previous afternoon and had ourselves another epic feast for less than $2 USD. Man, was that place tasty.
Here's me about to lapse into a food coma. We both totally gorged ourselves and the whole meal for the two of us came to 60 Baht (about $1.25 USD). After lunch, we walked around for a bit and decided to head back to our room to read and nap until the afternoon cooled down a bit.
Phuket is famous for its vegetarian food! As soon as we'd finished dropped off our bags and freshening up, we headed out to get our veggie lunch on at one of the many local restaurants reviewed in our guide book.
We ended up going to an Italian restaurant and we shared a pasta dish and a pizza with blue cheese on it (that was really tasty!). By the time we'd finished eating lunch, the rain had finally stopped.
...and had a delicious Thai dinner. Afterwards, I walked into the center of town and got a massage and then I went to the scuba center I dived at last time I was on the island, and booked an early dive the next morning!
We relaxed and read and bought all kinds of delicious Thai fruits and snacks. My very favorite Thai fruit is rambutans! They are bright pink/red and look really hairy. But after you peel away the weird exterior, inside is a sweet, chewy sorta pulpy fruit that tastes like a cross between a lychee and a coconut!
A couple of minutes later, we were sitting there, eating our delicious pad thai (with a side of french fries, thank you very much) and enjoying the gorgeous view when...
Around 1pm we ate a delicious lunch. Here's Mer with two of the other tourists (If I remember correctly, they were from Germany) enjoying some post-lunch fruit.
We got home just before 4am and Meredith busted out a cake that she'd picked up from a bakery earlier that day when I was napping! That little sneak! We were way too full and drunk to even think about eating it, so decided to save it for the morning and called it a night! Thanks for coming out on my birthday, Meredith & Jeremy! I had an amazing time!
...and we ended up buying and eating some sliced durian!
If you don't know, the durian is Thailand's most famous fruit. It's really, really weird and smelly. The best description of it that I've ever read was written by British explorer Alfred Russel Wallace all the way back in the late 1800s:
This pulp is the edible part, and its consistence and flavour are indescribable. A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes.
Jeremy's a vegetarian too and when he told us that he'd never been to May Kaidee's restaurant, we decided to go back there for dinner (even though we'd just eaten lunch there like 5 hours ago!). Hahaha.
We ended up going to a place near Khao San called Mai Kaidee's and it was some of the best vegetarian food I've ever eaten in my life. Holy, cramoly. I've since found out that she's pretty famous and runs a vegetarian cooking school and even has a recipe book! Right after we'd sat down to eat, it started pouring rain! We took our time eating and tried to wait out the rain.
The meal started out a little rocky. I ordered something on the menu called "Delicious Peanut Bread" and when it showed up it was two slices of stale white bread cut in half and a plate of peanut sauce to dip the bread in. Booooooooo!
We woke up a little after 10pm and headed downstairs to get some dinner. One of the best parts about Thailand is that you get to eat Thai food for every meal. (Compared to home where only about 65% of my meals are Thai food).
In the UAE, everyone takes off on Friday and Saturday (instead of Saturday and Sunday), so that meant that Faisal had to go back to work on Sunday. Meredith and I woke up, had ourselves some breakfast at the house...
The lunch time crew! From the right: Philip, Biba, Faisal, Mer and Philip's friend. The food was great, but if you look in the background, you'll notice something more interesting than the food...
Hahaha. After we finished our snack, we walked around the boardwalk for a while and then decided to call it a day. There weren't many other bands playing that we were interested in seeing...er, and we both had stomachaches from eating greasy boardwalk food. Hahah.
On Sunday afternoon I rode my bike up to Central Park to meet Emilie and Mona at the Central Park Zoo! Here they are chowing down on a pre-zoo Chipwich! Mmmmmmm!
I talk a big game, but I'm a total lightweight when it comes to eating in bulk (I has a tiny stomach!). But I still love buffets because I get to eat all sorts of weird combos of food that you can't really get at "normal" restaurants.
The day was perfect. We pretty much just sat around stuffing our faces with snacks and enjoying the sun and occasionally stopping to mock people near us. Like the girl in the background that decided to use her boyfriend as a bench. WTF?
After eating way too much food for brunch, we decided to continue our overindulgence and double-down with some desserts! Here's Quinn's apple pie with EXTRA ice cream! Hahaha.
We ended up settling on a little Italian place we found a couple of miles down the road and the food was great. We ate, drank and used a bunch of touristy brochures to make a list of things we wanted to check out on vacation! Worn out from a long day of traveling, and being out in the middle of nowhere with no kind of nightlife at all, we decided to call it an early night!
And then Grant decided to "cool down" with a giant, 2 lb, barbeque TURKEY LEG! Hahaha. (Gross! Who the fuck can eat turkey in 90+ degree heat? You're so lucky you didn't die of salmonella).
The nice thing about living in NYC is that you probably don't have a car which means you can always take "full advantage" of an open bar. I ended having to keep my rental-car keys on the table as a reminder to take it easy.
It was some sort of cold noodle dish (surrounded by dry ice). After we were done with dinner, a Ninja/magician came by and wowed us with a few tricks. And then it was time for...
Then we headed back down to the East Village and took Grant's mom and Grammy Pam out for dinner at a Japanese BBQ restaurant! Check out Grammy Pam laughing about her chopsticks! I love this photo so much!
We slept in the next day, relaxed in our hotel room, and then set out to find a place to grab lunch around 2pm! We ended up at a Thai restaurant where, like always, we ended up ordering WAY too much food.
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