Full-on Canadian

So this town I live in is called Tonsai Village.  It’s a bit of a shanty town, but it’s got some great, clean restaurants and places to stay, but still quite shanty.  Tonsai, by the way in Thai means “tourist”.  It’s hard to take yourself seriously when you live in Tourist Village.  It’s all quite mad.  It reminds me of Pinocchio – There’s plenty of charlatans and ne’er-do-wells, sinful distractions, a tiny conscience nobody really pays much attention to and  Europeans.  Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure that whoever drummed up Pleasure Island spent a considerable amount of time on Phi Phi beforehand.  The young and innocent come in by the literal boatloads and many wind up drinking themselves silly.  There’s actually a bar where you can pick a fight with other tourists.  The place is called ‘Reggae’.  Unrelated, a couple nights ago, some guy got stabbed.  It sounds like he might have had it coming.  The story I heard he was taunting some of the local Thai guys and things got out of hand.  I saw the guy 2 days later down by the shop, showing off his stitch job.  It’ll leave a mark, of that I’m sure.  Turns out he was American.  Another fun activity is picking up street buckets, which is a micky of booze, a can of coke and a bottle of Thai RedBull.  2 for 1 is a popular marketing gimmick.  Once you have your fists of fury, you head out to the beach for flamming jump rope and hula hoops.  And yes, people do get burned.  You see them walking by the shop all beat up the next day with bandages on themselves.  Also, probably American.

I was out for a couple drinks with some of my mates from the shop a few nights ago at that beach bar, Sunflower I mentioned earlier.  It was loads of fun, most of them are South African.  In the shop, when they’re talking with the other staff/customers you can mostly understand what’s being said.  When they all get together off the clock, the coherency just plummets.  On a related note, I can tell a Canadian accent when I don’t have to repeat in my mind whatever someone just said to me.  Anyway, we’re having drinks and Jayson, one of the SAs says
“Brew, Ah’ve nevah met a fuhll on Cahnadian behfore.  I just wanna ahsk won qewestion.”
*he wispers something to one of his mate’s sitting next to him*
“Go for it, dude”
“What’s yhour favourite spohrt?
“Is this a trick question?”
“Noh, Brew”
“definitely Hockey, then”
*all in unison* “WHOOAH” “I knewh it!!”

hilarious.  We then spent the next little while talking about Canadian stuff and hockey.  One of the guys there was a Swede so he of course had to give props to his fellow countrymen.  It was all a good time.

Other than that, things are slowly coming together.  I have to take things real easy since I’m not making very much money yet.  I’ve been paid once and things are going up, but it does take a little bit of time to get established.  I’m still diving lots which is great.  I take back what I said about Leopard Sharks being boring.  I almost sat on one the other day.  Close one.  Not to worry though, they don’t even have real teeth.  You know who else doesn’t have real teeth?  Some poor lady on a cruise one of my divers told me about today.  This girl used to work on a cruise ship and when the waves became tipsy, the staff hands out vomit bags.  It gets intense, as it turns out.  It’s quite common to have to exchange full bags for fresh ones at regular intervals, and in large groups, it’s the worst.  As soon as one goes, it’s like some kind of wild hysteria and everyone goes.  Anyway, this girl was about to discard a particularly messy bag when the lady who gave it to her cried out, “WAIT, my dentures are in there!”  *BLEEEEEAGH*.

Disgusting.

Anyway, I hope home is well.  I see the leafs are still miserable.  Ah well.  Cheers.