Out of Sin City and Closer to Paradise

Wow, Pattaya that was an experience... we just had to see it for ourselves.  Seeing things for yourself is far more enlightening than what you see on the Internet or what you read about.  I've thrown in some more pictures to give you an idea of what was there.





At one point Shelly decided to get her nails done in one of the shops and left me to wander about by myself.. found a new friend!!  I'm not sure of what gender this individual was, she/he was happy to have their picture taken with me.

Troubling thing was that some of the prettier "girls" were not necessarily girls.  Oh well, different culture.  Here they don't make a big deal about confused genders, they accept people for who they are. 

The next morning we headed out early for Hau Hin.  To get there we had to head up and through Bangkok again which was not to bad for the first part of the trip.. we rode in an nice air conditioned bus with nice comfortable seats and a nice view out of the windows.  From Bangkok towards Hau Hin it got more interesting.. here we were crowded into a mini bus with twelve other people and all their  associated baggage and wow what a ride!! The guy must of thought he was in a grand prix.  He didn't waste any time in getting us to where we were going, flying down the highway going 150 kph and with as little as 3 feet between us and the vehicles ahead of us.  The funny thing was that pretty well everyone on the bus except Shelly and I had the curtains drawn and were having a nap???

Needless to say, we did of course make to Hau Hin.  What a pleasant change from the hustle bustle of Bangkok and the craziness of Pattaya.  The city is still a busy place but not so frantic.  You can tell that it is more of a vacation type of town.. people from Bangkok and other areas of Thailand come here for vacation.  The town is also very popular because of its great beaches and the fact that the Thai Royal Family come here for vacations.

Once we out into the streets and had wandered around a bit we found that there were people from all over Europe and a ton from Russia vacationing here.  In fact, many of the signs here were in Thai and Russian... a little different than what we are more used to, Thai and English.  It seems pretty well everywhere we travel the favoured tourist language is English.

Yesterday was a down day for us as I was stricken with some kind of food poisoning which we suspect  came from some seafood we had eaten.  Funny thing is that one might expect that something like that might happen from eating street food, but this came from a fancy restaurant overlooking the ocean.  Can't judge a book by its cover.

Today was much better as far as health was concerned... Shelly went out yesterday and got some medicine for me and it seems to have done the job.  We spent some time viewing properties today with a real nice Real Estate fellow from Germany and has been living here
for the last seven years.  Saw some pretty nice places, some we might even consider... they had to have a nice outside garden area and had to have a swimming pool.  Once we were done with that, we checked out the nice "air conditioned" shopping malls and did a little shopping.  A nice break from the heat.







 Tomorrow we might rent a motorbike and see a little more of the city and area... but for now, I'll throw a few pictures into the blog and then call it a day.. talk to you soon.