it's so hard to say goodbye

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and then there was one

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. All I know is that I want to be the catcher in the rye. My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hun. All famous and popular quotes, and all have nothing to do with vachina (I did however re-read Catcher in the Rye... it sucked in high school and it still sucks now.) Anyway, this is all a futile attempt for me to deny that Team Vachina is breaking up. It was such a quick romance…one that I thought would last forever, but now, alas, it has broken my heart. Sigh. Cry. Vomit. Dizziness.

I've learned so much since Day 1. Here is an updated retrospective.

WOODY


Strengths: Goes with the flow. Amazing with keyboard shortcuts. Looks good in American Apparel undies.

Weaknesses: Needs to stop every 10 minutes for water. Is more "surprisingly conservative" than I would have EVER imagined, especially in China. Picks gay clubs for us to go to (oh, he didn’t tell you THAT did he?) Thinks he’s a supermodel now and acts like it.



CTOWN


Strengths: Is a girl, so gives Woods and I instant street cred with the chicks. Guilin girls thought she was a super model. Wakes us up in the morning (then falls back asleep). Started the whole music video trend.

Weaknesses: Likes to lose important things like her ATM card, wallet, and her innocence. Still likes to swallow cantaloupes, but now has added mangoes, as well.




SIMON

Strengths: His ability to convince Team Vachina that PIBE is a good thing, even though we really had no idea what the heck we were doing.

Weaknesses: going to miss the hell out of VACHINA.BLOGSPOT.COM




Favorite moments: creating a “BUG” for all our videos, CTOWN acting drunk without sipping a single sip of alcohol at 3:30AM EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. Roller skating and bowling. Fantasy, Paradise, Damn, Girl. Teaching our moms how to use youtube. Laughing out loud uncontrollably at really stupid stuff. Oh yeah, and being in China for a month.

By the time you read this, Woody will be in the process of starting to get really yucky teeth and CTOWN will be somewhere over the ocean on the way home.

Woods, thanks for teaching me humility
Cynthia, thanks for teaching me honor
Vachina, thanks for teaching me how to love

One. One moment in time. Pepsi One. One flew over the Cuckoo's nest. One Love. One. It really is the loneliest number.

Back to reality

The last couple days in Thailand were eye-opening. Went to a ping pong show. So that happened. We also went to a cabaret show called Calypso Cabaret which stars mostly ladyboys / drag queens. We saw signs for this everywhere. It’s more tame than it sounds. They lost me when they had Thai Marilyn Monroes, Tina Turners and Michael Jacksons perform a medley. Plus it was all lip-synced. Boo. It felt like the end of Dirty Dancing when Baby is sitting through the boring, stale, grown-up show -- only Patrick Swayze and his rag tag group of cutting edge youths never come to the rescue to make the party Real.



Catching a plane in a couple hours. Meanwhile, I am sitting in our hotel room amongst a nuclear fall-out of our useless night market buys, also dubbed precious memories, not packed at all.

Thanks vachina. Don’t know what we would have done without you. You were probably like the kid that distracted us parents from tearing each other to pieces. Or maybe the catalyst for a future one-upping rivalry between the three of us that will make the rivalry in The Prestige look brief. In any case, it’s been more than expected. See you back in the present time and no longer from 12 hours into the future.

Simon is going back to Shanghai to study Chinese, so Vachina may still live on yet...

PS. If you are ever abroad and lose your atm card and need access to those funds, do not under any circumstances open a bank account with the Bank of China, Guilin branch, and have Commerce Bank wire money over into it. I’m just saying. Use Western Union. For the love of Buddha, use Western Union.

PPS. If anyone wants to go to Guilin, China, let me know. I need to go too to run an errand...

Thailand recap + coping

Woody pretty much covered everything that we have been remiss about blogging, and now the feat of following up his majestic sign off...

We went to Thailand thinking that it would be a week of relaxation, beaching, getting cheap massages and living off $10 a day. First stop -- the beach! It actually ended up being pretty expensive and hectic. Koh Samui's Hat Chaweng Beach was like a Euro-Cancun Frat/Sorority destination + of course, old white guys w/ Thai chicks. The main strip was a tourist trap packed with souvenir shops and pricey restaurants and hotels.



We got a couple massages. I felt like an addict after the first one. The girls performed synchronized pounding on all of us and double-teamed each of us at one point. They always try to steer you away from the Thai massage, which is always the cheapest one. Why wouldn't you want to try the Thai massage in Thailand? I will never know because their persuasion worked on us. "Thai massage is hard and rough. Oil is relaxing. If you have never had a Thai massage before, you should get an oil massage." By that logic, one would never get a Thai massage.

The nearby island of Ko Pha-Ngan celebrates the full moon by having a rave on the beach called The Full Moon Party. It consists of flame throwers, bubble parties, elevated dance stages, house/trans/pop/hip hop music blasting from the row of bars, black light tattoos, buckets of mixed drinks and locals dealing along the shore.



If was fun, but there wasn't a sense of community that you might expect at something like this. Everyone stayed to themselves or were passed out on the beach.

One of the highlights of Thailand for me was scuba diving. We went to a private beach off Koh Tao. It was my first time going. The water is so clear, and there are fish in even 1 inch of water. The fish are friendly too, if they can be that. It is probably more of them treating us as if we were just another sea being. A whole school of big, rainbow fish encircled Woody, not unlike they do Ariel during the "Under The Sea" number in "The Little Mermaid."



Second stop -- Bangkok! A custom that caught me off guard was the Thai people's earnest bowing with prayer hands after you have finished a conversation. So I have gotten into the habit of doing a head bow whenever acknowledging someone or when I get change back etc. If you don't belive me, ask this guy.



The malls here are ridonks. They have a lot of pride in their malls. Their food courts have good food, flat screen tvs, huge aquariums and a gourmet market. Although, the flat screens just play a loop of commercials, so you eat to the first 30 seconds of Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" every 2 minutes when this car commercial comes on. Simon calls this area the Rodeo Drive of Bangkok. This is the exterior of the mall - Siam Paragon/Siam Center.



On the 3rd floor of the mall:



Next to these, they also have Ferraris, Lambourghinis, Lotus-es and Guess jeans.

On the first floor, they had a photo studio that was in the vain of glamour shots. We couldn't resist.




Rain was here to perform a concert, and he stayed in the hotel across from this mall. He was posted up everywhere. I really wanted to go see him, but the guys were equally enthusiastic about not going. My appetite was slightly satiated when I saw him schilling for orange product.



After Woody left, we moved to expat central. We live on a street (Khao San) that is listed as a Night Market in Lonely Planet. It's another culture shock. The foreigners outnumber the locals about 5 to 1 here. Everyone is extremely outgoing. They have mobile bars set up in the streets and stools for people to quickly get their drink on.



Also heard some live music. Thailand is a lot more hip and modern than I thought. Definitely more than China! Communist vs Capitalist? Everyone is also very polite. They bargain here with a smile instead of the cut throat bargaining in China. Although they love their 90's music. On MTV, they played back to back: "Hammer Time", "Macarena", and "Who Let The Dogs Out." This might have been a 90s block, but at the bubble party at the Full Moon Party, they played "Get Jiggy With It" and other 90s songs. Why not? I love me some 90s music.

Simon and I are here for a couple more nights sans Woody. We'll prob have one more sign off blog. Til then, here is a tribute to our ex-fellow expat:

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.

strictly for my ninjas!

yo homies. have you ever been sitting at home alone, feeling blue? do you wish that you had that someone SPECIAL in your life? do you ever say to yourself, "damn, i wish i could see a lot more hot, fine, steaming, sizzling chinese women?" well, wait no more.

4 cities. 9 locations. 3 cameras. 1 common goal.

enjoy, my ninjas.

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