I think we got overcharged for our taxi. Phuket was apparently the only place K didn't read about and prepare for because he said he wasn't really all too interested in it. So, the taxi counter inside the airport charged us 550 baht but supposedly just getting a metered taxi would only cost 450 baht ($3 rip off, bah). We're staying at a place in Patong, 40km from the airport.
Some of the streets look similar to Bangkok, except with fewer street vendors and many small shops. I'm hoping things aren't too much more expensive than they were in Bangkok though.
We're only a little late for the compulsory $68 (US dollars) Christmas dinner. I can't imagine any dinner being worth $68 per person, but that's just me. Everyone enjoys spending $ on different things I suppose. There was a lot of food to eat... seafood, satays, various salads, lots of fruit and dessert, etc.
The entertainment first started out with some fire twirling... then a dance and cabaret type show with transsexual dancers. K didn't believe the "girls" were transsexual at first (because their legs were too good/girly), but Beilie said she heard them talking to each other after the show and Ling said she saw their Adam's apples. After the cabaret part, there was traditional Thai music and dancing.
There were also games... like five couples chosen from the audience and the winner was which blindfolded girl could feed a banana to their guy the fastest, or musical chair chairs in which all the volunteers picked were little kids... prizes... and random music to which you could dance (with people lip-syncing and guitar-syncing to the music on stage... don't know why they couldn't just DJ the music without the extra people lip-syncing).
Prizes... they gave out some random prizes (each guest got a raffle into the drawing). A little after Beilie, Ling, and Xiao (finally arrived in the middle of dinner!) went back up to their rooms, they drew for the "grand prizes". Something like 10 of them. If they called your table and you weren't there, then they would draw again until they got to a table that was there. I counted something less than twenty or so tables left (out of over 15)... guess everyone thought there wasn't really much else... it was 9 or 10pm afterall. K said to me during the 3rd or 4th prize, "ok, the next one is ours, room 1213" and sure enough, it was! I was in disbelief for quite a while at the timing of his comment. We won some "James Bond 4 in 1 tour", whatever that meant.
A while later, table 5, Beilie, Ling, and Xiao's table also got a prize, for which I pretended to be one of them and went up to accept... it was a 3-night stay at the hotel between March and December 2007. Xiao ended up taking it since the island resort thing is right up her alley.
There was one table that won 4 prizes! They had 5 people all run up on stage to accept each prize every time... it was like a group of 10 people at the table.
The hotel room is "ok", almost three times as expensive and not as nice as our Siem Reap room.
Sleep. 12 midnight.
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