Jeff hooked us up with Toy Fair badges (with other people's names on them - so we had to pretend that we were TOY BUYERS!!!) and set out with us to explore all the booths! We got to visit the Cranium pavilion! This is pretty much the closest Meredith's ever come to a religious pilgrimage.
Vestiges of larger ancestral arms? Oh, man - can you imagine how much scarier a t-rex would be if it had normal sized arms that it could use to reach out and grab you?
We left Chaweng and drove about 40 minutes to Lamai Beach to see Hin Ta and Hin Yai (Grandpa & Grandma). They are two natural rock formations that are supposed to look like male and female genitalia, respectively!
After we ate, we wanted to go out and do something, but like I mentioned early, Phuket is kind of a sleepy town. Walking around, we ran into this place and decided to see if there was anything going on inside.
...and then set out to find some famous Thai restaurant. After more than an hour of wandering around (and getting our feet attacked by fire ants when we stepped off the road into the grass on some side street while I tried to figure out where we were on the map), we found out that the restaurant had since closed down! So we decided to just wander around until we found somewhere else good to eat. We didn't end up at HongKong Chinese Restaurant....
Phuket was a little sleepy and the weather was so crummy that we decided we were going to move on the next day. After we'd finished eating, we hit an internet cafe to see if we could book a flight later that afternoon to Koh Samui, but all the flights out of Phuket were booked for the next several days! We went to the tourism authority to see if they could help us book a bus and ferry to get to Samui but the lady there didn't speak any English and our best efforts at pantomime resulted in her handing us a bus schedule to somewhere else. Which, totally defeated, we pretended was exactly what we'd been asking her for. Hahaha.
Around 4pm, we were out walking around and we decided to rent a moped and do some exploring! (Moped rental was 250 Baht, around $5 USD, per day!). Thailand is really inexpensive, but Phuket was shaping up to be one of the most inexpensive places in Thailand I've ever been to!
...take a taxi all the way across town and out to a suburb of Bangkok to visit the international school where Jeremy teaches English! We arrived at the school a little after 4pm...
OMG, when you see a sign like this on the entrance to a buffet restaurant, you know the place is like fatty-heaven. (And by fatties I mean actual gluttons, not capital F Fatty as in "The" Fatty. Although, now that I think about it, he'd probably really love this place too).
I love how they put these posters on the side of the ATM all the way near the back so that you'd never see it if you were actually using the machine to withdrawal money. You stay classy, Harrahs!
There were hundreds of plants and trees and each species had a little red placard stuck in the ground with some details about it. I was in the midst of touching a very strange looking plant when Meredith gasped and pointed to the fine print on the nearby placard. "WILL CAUSE PAINFUL BLISTERS IF TOUCHED!" Gee, you probably could've put that info at the top of the goddamned sign!
After the family left, I borrowed my dad's car and drive down the street (literally 1 block away) to visit Rachael R. (whose last name I can also no longer use on this site because, Like me friend Jess D., she also teaches high school now and can't afford to have her students Google her and find her doing all sorts of stupid stuff on this site!).
Aw yeah, Holland Tunnel! (The windows that you can see are the windows to the building I work at! When I took this photo I was all "Have a nice day at work....SUCKAS!")
The only thing more shocking than the idea of a shooting range in San Francisco was the discovery of what was on display in a huge glass case right when you walk in the door.
The best part about Ming Dynasty is that they're always having to change their "eating policies" because all-you-can-eat places attract really fat people who go there because they want to make sure they get "their money's worth." Check out how they had to amend the sign to reduce the maximum stay down to two hours. Think about that. That means that at some point, enough people would show up, eat, then hang out for like 3 or 4 hours until they were hungry, and then eat again! That's why they had to update this sign!! Incredible!
And despite being totally stuffed with food, I spied a poster for this badboy on the wall, and snapped a pic to remind myself to sample the Club House Mac, Japan's contribution to McDonald's international menu before leaving.
On Thursday afternoon I was in mid-town running errands and I popped over to Google to visit Emily and enjoy Google's totally awesome Flunch (free-lunch) cafeteria.
Remember how on my trip to Thailand I was complaining about how loud the gecko in my room was? Well the museum likens the noise it makes to "the bark of a small dog." Hahah.
Afterwards, I headed over to Flatstock (which is this huge poster designer's conference that was going on in Austin at the same time as SXSW) to try to find a poster for my buddy Devin.
Aw, man talk about trying to harsh my mellow! I was all trying to party down and have fun and then people have all got to be reminding me that we lost a great man earlier in the year. We miss you, Dimebag. Not forgotten, indeed.
...Jake (the guy who moved into my old room) had somehow agreed to let some film production company use the apartment to shoot a gay porno. WTF? The narrative of the movie called for the porno to be taking place at "a party" so Jake called up everyone pleading for them to come over and help it look like a party.
I had to take a bus to a different terminal and laughed my ass off at this "wagen halt" button. It means "stop the bus," but my friend Alysha uses it to describe the cringey feeling you get when you watch someone else do something that makes you so embarrassed to be a fellow human that you have to leave the area. (This came up at an NHL match when after the 2nd period, they had an "entertainer" in a sparkly silver lycra unitard skate around on the ice and juggle.)
While walking around the airport kept seeing all these signs for separate "prayer rooms" they had set up to accommodate five different religions. The room for Christian prayer is a normal room. The other four rooms for the other denominations all have trapdoor floors that send any (filthy, non-Christian infidel) inhabitants down a chute into a giant incinerator. You gotta keep an eye on those sneaky Germans!
Jake seemed to think that we could pass unnoticed into the business class "Admiral's Club." As I predicted, We went over like a reggae band at a KKK rally.
On Saturday night we headed over to Jamie's 3rd Annual "Ball." (He lost one of his fellers to testicular cancer - "Yep, cancer o' them ol' testes" - a few years back and has since started throwing a party to celebrate the fact that he's alive and to raise money for cancer research.
This isn't from New Year's, but it was one of the pics that Katie sent around with the other pics she took of the night and I thought this would be as good a place as any to re-post it.
On Thursday morning, we all hopped in the car to go to Walmart so Meredith could get clean undies (she forgot to pack 'em!) but they were closed for the holiday.
Here's Philip, instilled with a new sense of confidence, in front of our brand new (much more professional looking) banner! Hey, I'll give you one guess where we decided to go after we were done for the day...
Here's our totally ghetto-ass booth all set up the next morning at the conference. We ended up taking the "Fucked Company" banner down because we were worried that people might think that we were saying that we were a fucked company because the airline lost our banner - instead of realizing that AdBrite's founder had started a website called FuckedCompany. Da-da-disaster! Instead of trying to explain how we were feeling, how about I just show a close-up of Philip's expression?
The airline also lost Philip's giant "Fucked Company" banner. (He started a site called FuckedCompany.com and people always want to meet him. So we planned on enticing people over with the FC banner and then talking to them about AdBrite). So we decided to also make a banner that said "Fucked Company" and explained that the airline lost our signs.
...the mothefucking Star Trek-themed Quark's Restaurant! Awwww, yeah boy-eeeeeee! Who wants to stay in a hotel that's filled with hot chicks when you could be enjoying a Warp Core Breach with a grown man dressed up as a Klingon! (More on that later, though).
One of us had a tiff of the logo on our laptop so we got it blown up super big and printed out on a giant paper banner. We then hand-painted it. The entire time we laughed about how ghetto it is to show up at an advertising themed conference (you know, where people are supposed to be experts on how to advertise) with a fucking paper, hand-painted banner.
At the office on Thursday the printer we were working with showed us a mock-up of the big company logo banner we'd hired them to create and on the mock-up was a test print out they'd done for another customer. We liked him so much we told them not to cut it and hung it up on our office wall.
I drove Emily to the airport and we laughed about how Rt 80 runs all the way across the country and goes right through Succasunna, NJ, the town that we both grew up in.
After a few drinks, we went around the corner to score some late night eats at this place called Sam Wo which is apparently famous for a waiter that worked there for like 30 years named Edsel Ford Wong who was rude to all the customers. I just Googled
him and found out that he was
famous for saying things like "You want tea? Get it yourself!" Ooooooh!
Caustic! After getting my lo mein on, it was time for....
Ok, not really. The real story is this: Like when Meredith visited, I suggested that before coming out Leigh should put together a list of stuff that she wanted to do and see when in San Francisco. So when Leigh showed up sans list, I was like "Now what are we going to do!" She was like "What did Meredith's list look like?" When I busted out Meredith's super-detailed crazy printed out itinerary, Leigh was in awe. "Did you guys really get to do all this?" "Not even half of it," I replied. "Good," Leigh said tapping the sheet. "Here's our itinerary." First up - Alcatraz!
...even though San Francisco prides itself on supporting the openly gay, they still totally care for their citizens that for whatever reason haven't gone public with their orientation. They even have a whole aisle of specialty products to accommodate them. So progressive!
Driving a little further we saw a turn in off the road that led to a nice little park and took it. Then we got of the car and saw this sign. Fucking mountain lions? Are you kidding me? So let me get this straight, California - you've got a beautiful ocean that too cold to even GO IN and you've got scenic parks where CHAIN MAIL SHIRTS are recommended if you want to toss a frisbee around? W. T. F. ?
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)