It rained all night. Not a light rain but a tropical downpour. It’s still rainy season in Phuket, but only because it’s still raining. It should be sunny. We sat around all morning and talked to Gary’s mom and later to Gary’s sister, Barb, via Skype. We have a calling plan on Skype that costs about $32 CAD per year and allows us to make unlimited voice calls to any phone in USA and Canada. The latest switch to this great deal is that we need to use a VPN now to call the USA or Canada or else we get the ”you can not make this call from your calling area”. Excuse me, my calling area is not Thailand! Skype (aka Microsoft) has now got greedy and tracks our IP address thus limiting our calling options. Therefore we use Express VPN to give us a Toronto IP address. This is not an advertisement for Express VPN, but it allows us to safely bank, pay bills and surf the web from any location in the world. Unfortunately we have been unable to watch Amazon Prime Video with our VPN. So, we can’t watch the new season 4 of Yellowstone. Apparently if we log into Amazon Prime Video we must use second factor authentication which means receiving a SMS (text message) code on our Canadian cell phone. We are not using our Canadian cellphone numbers here due to the obvious ridiculous high cost of international roaming. We’ll watch Yellowstone season 4 when we get home.
So, back to the rain here, nothing like the recent rainfall in BC but its unrelenting. The rain did let up for a bit so we went for a walk and picked up a pineapple from a small fruit stand for ฿30 ($1.20 CAD), and a few Croissants for ฿16 each ($ 0.64 CAD). We stopped at the Little Persian restaurant and had very light lunch for ฿220 ($8.50 CAD) We kind of got got stuck at the restaurant because of more tropical rain. We finally took a Grab ride back to the villas. It’s good to get out of our room for a bit and it also gives the staff here an opportunity to get our room cleaned! As soon as they see us leave they usually hustle over to clean. The staff here have been awesome.
Here’s a quick unedited video of our villa where we are staying. Gary shot this the night we arrived, October 31, 2021
While at the restaurant we did talk to one patron sitting across from us, a young man from Brittany, France. After he left, the guy sitting at the only other table started chatting with us, big surprise, a Canuck. Surprisingly, he is originally from Quebec and has lived in Thailand for 11 years. He does livestream “Twitch” videos for his money. FYI. Twitch is an online streaming platform like YouTube, just so you know!
We finally got back to our villa after 4 pm, so it was time to think about what to order for supper. We settled on Highway Curry and Indian Food. We ordered 2 Phanaeng Curry (aka penang curry) with chicken and 2 steamed rice. We ordered it medium spicy. Note to self, medium spicy in Thailand is HOT. It cost us ฿364 about $14 CAD including tip and delivery. We topped it off with Tiger beer from the fridge, previously from the Family Mart up the hill. For dessert we tried to limit the fire within with a serving of strawberry yogurt.The Phanaeng Curry is likely the hottest thing we have eaten – EVER!
We are hoping for some sun tomorrow but honestly anything we get here short of a tsunami is better than home. We have made good use of our Kindle e-readers the last few days.