Drinking in the Full Moon... metaphorically and literally.

For those of you wondering why we have been on "post silence" for the past few days, it's due to preparations for the full moon party that Nico just wrote about. You see, after months of hassling me, my wonderful sister convinced me that despite its tourist-y nature, Nico and I had to go to the full moon party.

Over the course of the past two days, Nico and I decided to take it easy... you know, because you have to go into any 20 thousand person party with the assumption that you are going to be kind of hurting afterwards. With that in mind, our daily events went something like this - Moped around, eat delicious Thai food, get hour long Thai massages for 7 dollars, make new friends at the beach and at the pool, and repeat. I mean, we needed to be relaxed, right?

When we departed for Haadrin, we had no idea what to expect. When we arrived with Luc (not Lucky - Nico officially cant remember the name of a person who does not have nice legs) and the other travelers from our hotel, we weren't shocked, but certainly pleasantly surprised to see what ensued. While I wish we had a camera, I am glad we opted to play it safe on this one and leave the camera at home. But let me do my best to describe the scene.

As we drove up, people, taxis, and make-shift bars lined the road. No fewer than 500 people could be seen walking the two block area outside of the beach. Alright, there were a lot of people, so we were prepared for a good time. Yeah, we had no clue. Upon actually entering the beach, we realized that the entire beach was filled with Farang (mostly European students on gap years before university). There were around 20 thousand people surrounding every bar, covered in blacklight paint, drinking out of buckets. Trashy European house music was blasting from almost every speaker and throughout the crowd, there was the occasional temporary stage set up to allow less than reputable girls to make poor decisions. Yeah, it was essentially a scene from a movie. It was surreal.

We drank in the sights, we drank in the music, and we drank ALL THE DRINKS. Actually, Nico and I stayed somewhat sober, but we did take it all in. After about 5 hours of walking around, buying buckets, eating terrible bar/street food, we decided that we'd had enough flirting with girls and meeting ridiculously drunk 19 year old dudes. Note: That could easily have gone the other way, as I am sure you could guess, if we met more interesting women. We called it a night and hopped in a cab home.

The cab ride was an ordeal. Not only did we spend upwards of 30 minutes arguing with cab drivers as to how many stops we were going to make along the way, we managed to end up in the worst possible situation at the end of it all. We ended up in a cab going halfway to our hotel, and were on our own to find a second to take us the rest of the way. That's alright, it wasn't too crowded, and it seemed like there were some nice Americans in the cab.

Wrong. In an attempt to be friendly on the half hour cab ride, Nico told the girl next to him it was good to hear another American accent. I guess that is not an appropriate comment because within seconds, there was a FURIOUS Canadian yelling at Nico and ranting about how Americans were assholes. Well, at this point I thought she was joking around, because, really, I mean... everyone wants to be an American! Unfortunately for me, I guess she wasn't, because when I waved off her comment smiling and told her that she was just unhappy her home country of America Jr. wasn't as well respected as ours, she went from furious to ravenous lunatic. Canadians are surprisingly angry people. We got yelled at most of the way home, before arriving at 5:15

This morning we discovered that we had the earliest evening of anyone staying at our hotel. More proof of the continuing lesson that we, the old guys here, can't party like all the new high school graduates coming over from Europe. Terrible but true.

This morning we all shared stories and complained about our hangovers (which Nico and I embellished for sympathy's sake). It was a good time.