Weekend Fun in Pattaya and Hua Hin

Team Building in Pattaya

I guess it is time to fill everyone in on my awesome weekend in Pattaya and Hua Hin. My weekend started early Friday morning with a pool run and jumping in the cab to school as usual although, it was not going to be another day of planning. Campus 2 admin had planned us a wonderful team building day with the foreign teachers and Thai teachers. It started off with a car rally. For those of you who do not know, a car rally is a kind of scavenger hunt done in cars. The whole car rally was in Thai though so we had to try to communicate as a team and find the things they asked us to find. We were one of the last teams to reach the second checkpoint so that's when I got super competitive! We were supposed to have a meal together as a team but, we said that we should just do it on the road so we can be faster! It turns out that we were the first team to make it to the destination in Pattaya, but apparently in car rallies in Asia it doesn't matter who gets there first! So then we went out for lunch at a great Seafood place on the ocean. My favorite thing there was a kind a green curry with scallops and squid.

Once we git back to the resort, there was no time to mess around and we started all of the team building activities. The resort itself was pretty nice but we didn't really have time to relax. We played team building games all afternoon until 6. At that point we had a little bit of down tome before supper. That's when we took off for a run. Not a long one, but enough to see a bit of the town. Pattaya is a pretty neat place. There are lot's of tourists that go there, mainly coming from Russia, which seemed bazaar to me, but apparently it's not a lot weirder than Canadians going to Mexico. When we got back to the resort we had a beautiful meal followed by karaoke,which the Thai teachers loved, but none of the foreign teachers participated. I was in bed pretty early, exhausted from the long day.

Hua Hin

The next morning, if was raining, which was disappointing because I wanted to lounge by the pool, instead I went for a short walk. We left the resort in Pattaya at 9am and drove back to school. We got to the school at about 12 after some brutal traffic. We then got picked up by a different van and got driven to Hua Hin. We got to Hua Hin at about 5pm and went out for supper at a place called "Admirals" which had Thai and Western food options. After super we went looking for some Thai boxing, which unfortunately, there was not on Saturday. On the way back to the hotel we hit up the night market, which was a huge market(at night obviously). I didn't buy anything major at the night market, but it was still awesome. When we got back to the hotel the power went out in our rooms. It was kind of a sketchy hotel. There were bugs and our toilet kept letting out massive air bubbles that we thought was a giant basilisk! The next morning I woke up at 4am. This may seem a bit crazy, but in reality, I have been waking up at 5 or 5:30 most mornings. I got up at 4 to run a half marathon. Luckily my running buddy (lets just call him "D-Machine"), stayed with a friend the night before and they picked me up at the hotel at 4:15AM. D's friends were wonderful. They drove us all the way up to the start line and dropped us off. When I say "all the way up", I mean UP! The 9th annual Preserve Heavy Half Marathon started at 5:30am and went straight down hill for a km. D went off the line like a rocket an I hung back to be cautious. At about mile 8 or 9 I caught up to him, but he heard my bike chaperone (because I was in first for women) coming up behind hi so he sped up. On the last few downhills, he gapped me enough that I couldn't catch him on the final climb. He ended up finishing about 20 seconds ahead of me and I finished in 1:35. Obviously, not my best time, but I was happy with it considering the heat, hill and I had only been here for a week. For winning the race I got the biggest  trophy ever, it was actually quite embarrassing bringing it back to the hotel with me.

For the rest of the day, I went to the beach with the other U of M students and in the evening went back to the night market.The next morning, we headed to "Monkey Mountain", which is obviously a mountain with many monkeys. It was a fantastic experience, minus the insane amount of of stairs up to the temple. I unfortunately was insanely stiff from the hills the day before.

My apologies if this isn't very well written, I'm extremely tired, must go to bed!

It was fantastic weekend out and about. Miss you all back home! XOXO 

Alice