Legal Tender

Friday - our first full day in Pattaya.  Quite happy to be able to once again partake of the great breakfast buffet at the Holiday Inn - delicious food and a wonderful variety of traditional breakfast foods from many cultures.  You can get bacon and eggs, but you can also get spicy noodles, fried rice, Chinese dumplings, and an assortment of unfamiliar fruits, just to name a few items available.  It's fun to try something new each day - today it was the carrot juice, with which I was pleasantly surprised.  And the servers are lovely - so polite and sweet.  A few remembered us from our visit over a month ago, and are patient enough to let me practice a Thai phrase or two on them.

In the afternoon, an energetic and bubbly local woman escorted us to the Tesco-Lotus store (like a Wal-Mart in that it has everything, but not at all like a Wal-Mart really) to get a local phone and take care of some banking. "Nee" (made me think of Ree) was a wiz at narrowing down which phones would work for us, and shuttling back and forth between the various providers to find the best price.  We wound up with a Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 at a very decent price.  At this point, let me just mention that we are suffering from TECHNOLOGY OVERLOAD!!  Between the two of us we have two laptops, a Kindle, and 5 phones in various states of use.  This wouldn't be so bad if we'd added the items gradually; but almost everything is new to us, so we are facing a big learning curve, constantly trying to figure out how this works on that device .  Also, it is a challenge to keep everything charged using the two adapters we have for the Asian outlets.  Kind of reminds me of the Star-bellied Sneetches constantly going in and out of Mr. McBean's machines - as soon as one comes out, another goes in.

Our visit to the bank was the first time I said aloud, "Oh, this is going in the blog!"  We brought a decent amount of US cash to change into Thai Bhats and deposit into our account.  When we handed the cash to the teller, she and the other teller gave each other a look - one of those looks that makes you wonder, "Now what?"  They divided the cash between the two of them and started very meticulously inspecting each bill.  Are they checking for counterfeit?  What else could it be?  Well, they sorted the cash into two distinct piles, and handed one pile back to us.  "These have damage," they said.  "We cannot accept."  The damage?  Honestly, you had to look with a magnifying glass to see them - an ink stain here, a tiny tear there.  Coming from a country where it's legal tender as long as the serial number is intact, we were taken aback, to say the least!  "No problem," Nee tells us, "you can change them at any currency exchange."    Interesting, no?  Guess it was a good thing none of them had "Where's George?" stamped on them!

For our first dinner, we decided to return to the restaurant where we ate on our last first night, the Deutsches Haus, not far from our hotel.  We enjoyed some Schnitzel and some Sauerbraten, washed down with a couple of Heinekens.  It is an open-air restaurant, as many places are here, and we had a few visits from polite salespeople trying to sell us watches and what-not.  No one was pushy, so it wasn't a problem.

As you can see, the sidewalks are quite narrow and uneven, making the trek up and down Beach Road a bit of a challenge.  You frequently have to walk single-file when people are coming from the other direction, not to mention wending your way around vendors and their carts, and motorbikes zipping out from the side streets.  A bit like the back room at "the Farm," right?

No fireworks this night, but a pretty great storm - luckily, we were safely ensconced in our hotel by then.  Always appreciate a good storm to help me fall asleep, although I had no trouble falling asleep this time!