Pattaya/ Koh Larn

Friday finally came and we had a night to go out and have fun. We had all planned to go to Walking Street get some dinner and spend the night having fun. Well it began to rain in the afternoon and that dampened some of our spirits especially mine. I had no real desire to go out in the rain to hang out on another "Duval" street. I was dressed in sweats yet they still made me go out. I wasn't too thrilled to go to Walking Street I felt that I had been on many streets like this and how is this different from anywhere else. We get to Walking Street and it looks like any other party street I have been to except this one has ping pong shows. A ping pong show is for an hour you go to a "strip club" and watch Thai women do things with their women's parts. For example, blowing darts and popping balloons, popping out ping pong balls, and opening a bottle. Of course everyone wanted to check out a show I personally could have done without. We went up to see the show it was quite sad and boring. The girls looked so miserable and the things they were doing wasn't too exciting. We left early. Everything was super expensive on Walking Street so I decided to be the sober friend because we were walking home and also people in my group had a habit of tossing their purses aside not realizing that they could be robbed. We went to numerous bars and got kicked out of one because the group did not buy five drinks. We went into this bar because that was playing cool music we wanted to dance and when no one got a drink right away we were sent away. It pretty much was the same story at every bar we went to. By 1 a.m. I was over being the sober friend and since we did not eat dinner I wanted out of there to go grab something to eat. We finally walked home getting to our hotel at 2 a.m. I ate some snacks and passed out.

The next morning we were suppose to get up early to go to the island of Koh Larn, but no one got up early and it was cloudy so we decided to have a lazy day. Some of the girls went and bought some movies we tried to watch a movie off her laptop but all fell asleep instead. That night we had a former LanguageCorp guy, Joe, come into town so we headed back down to Walking Street for dinner. This time we did go out to dinner at a place overlooking the water. It was nice to sit out under the stars and have a nice dinner. It was a pretty early night I wanted to get some stuff done for my Monday class and wanted to get some sleep before spending the next day at the beach.

We got up at 8 on Sunday morning and headed to the ferries at 9. It was $1 to take a 30 min. ferry ride to Koh Larn. Once we got off the ferries we went and grabbed moto bikes. The two guys with us Colin and Joe have driven motos before while Lindsay and I had never driven one before. Lindsay and I decided to get a moto together while Joe and Colin got their own motos. I once again let me state that Lindsay nor I have ever driven a moto so today was going to be very interesting. I was the first driver and I couldn't even get out of town the moto guy had to drive it out of the town for us. It was quite embarrassing. I was driving extremely slow because I was afraid I was going to kill myself on this thing. I had trouble making turns I kept making wide turns.  Of course I had to learn to drive a moto on an island full of hills and mountains. I realized my first problem was that instead of using the brake to slow down I was letting off the throttle because that is how I drive in the states. Lindsay and I had to pull over about three times because we lost our balance.

Finally we made it to the other side of the island to the beach we were going to spend our day. The beach was nice I thought the water was a little cold but everyone thought I was crazy. There were tons of Russians at this beach. There was even a Russian couple who sat behind us on the beach chairs that got married on the beach. The day was pretty chill we just sat around tanned and played in the water. When it was time to leave we decided that we would head up to this great viewing point up a mountain. The guys told us it had great 360 degree views of the island and a great view of Pattaya. As we were leaving Lindsay was the one who was suppose to drive but didn't know how to rev the throttle and when she figured it out almost killed a group of Russians by almost driving into the crowd. She was then told by one of the police officers that she was to not drive a moto. That meant I was the one to get us up the mountain. The mountain was for only motos and was a pretty narrow road. If you went off the road you would go down a steep hill into the water. The entire time I was cursing the guys and when I got to the worst part of the mountain I really wanted to kill them. The road at one point went practically straight up, if I let off the throttle for a second we were going to slide right back down and most likely down the mountain. Once I finally made it to the top it was so worth it.

The views were amazing and I was happy that I had done it. We walked around for a bit took some pictures and decided to head back down the mountain. Going down was just as bad as going up. My knuckles were white from holding the break the entire time. We finally made it to the bottom and decided that Lindsay should be able to drive the moto at least once so we took her to the flattest and longest road on the island to practice. We made it to the strip of road and Lindsay was finally able to drive the moto and she did great. We started to head back to the town to get on our ferry back to Pattaya of course there was no way I could drive the moto back into town so one of the guys had to do it for me. We grabbed some food and drink and got on the ferry for our 30 min. journey back to Pattaya. We had a pretty uneventful rest of the evening. We had dinner at a restaurant down the street and went to bed early. Our second week of teaching was about to begin and the end of training was nearing.