Phuket, Thailand

Phuket is in the south of Thailand, on the Indian Ocean, near the border to Malaysia. It’s definitely a tourist area and has a strong reputation for providing anything the tourists will pay for. We’re staying in a house a few miles away from the strip so we walked down the street to a market in the morning to buy coffee and fruit. Patrick cut up a big plate of mangoes, pineapple and bananas for our heathy breakfast. The fruit is at peak freshness and the merchants helped us with our selection. They laughingly insisted that Pat switch out bananas he picked up in favor of another bunch that looked the same to us. I haven’t seen any of the long, skinny bananas that we buy back home. These are smaller and much more flavorful. I think they’re called apple bananas.Freshness is definitely the main consideration when you’re shopping on the street…Straight from the tree or boat to the market. The electrical cables don’t seem to bother anyone except me but it looks so crazy seeing this big mess on virtually every street. At the beach, we walked along the shops and saw the typical touristy items such as T-shirts, sunglasses and souvenirs. There are a lot of personal service businesses like massage, nails, tattoos and hair salons. Daniel and Patrick laughed and laughed at this foot massage provided by little fish. The exchange rate is 35 Thai Baht per $1 U.S. dollar so this 15-minute treatment cost $3 USD. The views are so picturesque. And there’s no end to Thai food at very affordable prices (about $3 for a big plate of pad thai or curry with chicken).We spent Christmas Eve on the water. The Indian Ocean has warm, clear, blue water–perfect for snorkeling, diving, swimming and fishing and that’s just what we did. Although most of us are licensed SCUBA divers, we opted for snorkeling which was a good call because the water was shallow enough to see everything without going deeper.  The weather is so pleasant that we all got a bit more sun than we probably should have. Here’s a picture of Andrew, Patrick and Kristina jumping off the top of the boat into about 30 ft of water.We trolled most of the time we were out and caught about a dozen tuna plus this big mahi that Kristina brought in. Our guides cut up some of the tuna and made delicious sashimi with soy wasabi sauce. To get from the parking area down to the end of the dock where the boats are, there’s a little shuttle trolley that holds about 20 people but more like 50 get on it each time. Here are all four kids crammed into the trolley.  Fortunately, it’s a short ride. Kind of funny how we stand out among the Asians who are smaller. There’s no way we could pass as locals but we could easily be thought Europeans until we start talking.