sadness prevails

OK so it's coming down to the wire on this one. Team Vachina has basically been weeping an endless stream of tears because our vacation to our homeland is winding down to zero. Tomorrow I'm going to England, to go on tour with my friend's band The Flesh.

So I will give you a recap of things from my POV... so much has happened since my last post that this post is now officially in the "epic" status:

SHANGHAI

After Roller Rink Revival, the next night we got wasted and played expat bowling. The rules are: if you bowl a strike, you can tell someone to take a shot of Bai Jiu, which is a liquor that costs $1.13 US per bottle and tastes like castor oil. If you get a gutter ball, you must yourself take a shot. We got Adrian wasted out of his mindgrapes and by the end of the night he was drinking a coke with a rat in it.



We also ate crayfish, which for Cynth and me was like 1 mindblock away from us throwing up... My mental strategy was essentially: "look at someone else in the eyes while your hands rip open a crayfish. talk to them about literally anything. never let there be a moment where no one is talking, because that will make your brain go back to the fact that you're eating a giant twitching cockroach of the sea that was probably bred in an underground indoor pool. take a swig of sprite." Afterwards to congratulate ourselves, Adrian and I bought bootleg music DVDs (Yanni live for him, karaoke versions of ABBA videos for me).

Our last night there, we went to go see Adrian DJ, and he destroyed the place when he played the best dance song ever recorded:



Then we tried to go to Karaoke afterwards, but with no locals to guide us, we sat there like drunk monkeys trying to make the machine work. In the end, we sang "Tainted Love" twice, "I Had the Time of My Life," and 50 Cent's "Disco Inferno" about 12 times.

THAILAND

Let's just say that Thailand is not my favorite place on the planet. Everywhere we went there were horrible 40 year old white dudes with teenage Thai chicks hanging on their arms. Dude, I thought I got indignant whenever I see white dudes with Asian chicks? Thai guys must be fuming volcanoes on the insides: every single Thai female has a creepy middle aged white guy paying their bills, grabbing their asses, motorcycling them around, etc etc.



Also, I got the runs, got 46% of my blood sucked out by vampiric mosquitos, splintered my toe open against a rock, got sunburn, and basically complained the whole time about how crappy it was to stay in a bungalow on a beach in a tropical fairyland.

We also went scuba diving. I can't really complain about that. Look at how ridonkulous!



If you still somehow doubt how pristinely virginal this place is, simply observe:



This is at Koh Samui, a small island that is swarming with Australian backpackers... it's basically Fire Island. Or, Vegas: everything that you can possibly spend $$ on, they charge you for:



That's a sign charging you about 30 cents (toilet paper is more) to pay for the privilege of going to the public bathroom.

SHOPPING! We went to Chatachuk (sp?), an epic outdoor flea market where they sell everything under the sun. I consider myself a voracious shopper, and this place was truly olympian. It's under a tin roof, so already you're baking to death, and everything is so dense that you literally can't breathe, plus whatever air you can breathe is 70% fried foods baking 5 feet away. There were several points at which I was certain I would vomit/pass out. But my brain was like "where else are you going to get vintage Vietnam shirts/shirts with stupid hipster logos and phrases on them for so cheap?? Where??!!" and I stayed the course. In the end I got a purple shirt that prominently features kittens playing with a ball of yarn, and of course an oversized pair of pajama pants that say MARIJUANA all over them in giant letters over the colors of the flag of Jamaica.

All day today we have spent basically inside a mall or our hotel. It's literally 5:49 in the morning. I'm tired and want to go to sleep but Simon is cracking a whip over my head to continue blogging/stay awake til 9 so I can sleep on my 14 hour flight to Europe.

Goodbye dear sweet Vachina!

You made Simon feel compelled to eat pig's brain on camera!

You made Cynthia sleep less than she does in New York when she's working for Irv Gotti (an average of 1.5 hrs per night)!

Your post schedule was more demanding than MTV Chi!

Your bug caused us a cumulative 14 hours of render time!

Your blog name was so great that you made a bar full of 20 year old Australian expats laugh for literally 5 minutes!

...goodbye and good morning.