hihi!!

"do you feel the ground shaking? there's like an earthquake going on"

"i dont feel anything"

"come over here"

(long pause)

"right, we better get out of here"

I was awake in bed, fully alert but lazy to get out when i heard that conversation between my mom and dad. at first i thought me mom was talking utter nonsense, an earthquake? ya right man. Then i asked myself, why are the curtains swaying? and whats that creaking noise? the tremors werent very strong, but my safety inclined dad basically made us get out.

it wasnt very scary at the time, i was more amused than anything. particularly at this really confused naked man sticking his head out into the coridoor, who evidently got a fright of his life while showering. my dad was pretty alarmed, and as we ran down the emergency exit, told me to basically chiong all the way downstairs, and that he would stay with my slower moving mom. i thought he was overreacting but i complied.

downstairs there was a small confused crowd standing near the street, and a even more confused looking hotel manager (this hot angmoh girl), trying to organise things. my mom and dad looked pretty hilarious, standing outside in their bathrobe and pyjamas respectively.

a funny ironic thought: my gf thinks im a complete idiot and weirdo coz i like to play with 200 dollar torchlights and brick-sized swissarmy knives, but in the one instance where i may have really needed them to save my life i left them at my bed side, forgetting them but remembering to bring the hotel card-key down. haha ought to slap myself.

We talked to the spa receptionist (another hottie) afterwards, and she told us that the swimming pool (on the roof) water splashed over the side of the building (the spa is at the top floor).

As i said earlier, i found the whole experience pretty fun and exciting. but now, after reading/watching the news am i frightened. im sure most of you are aware that the richter scale is logarithmic, thus a richter 5 earthquake is ten times stronger than a richter 4, a richter 6 is 10 times stronger than a 5, 100x a richter 4. So, a richter 9 is a muthafuking gigantic titanic enormous piece of shit. This website says it is equivalent to 32 billion tonnes of TNT (that’s 32,000,000,000 tonnes). I was shocked to see the distance between aceh (near the epicentre) and Bangkok. It is far. Very far, yet our massive modern hotel shook.

this disaster really hit home. All my teenage notions of invincibility were crushed. as we all know phuket was devasted. When planning our holiday, phuket was a serious choice. And me, being the sun and sea loving type could easily have gone scuba diving during the morning of the earthquake. Jet skiers in penang were killed, I have fond memories as a child jet skiing in penang. Crazy.

The trouble is, in some situations you don’t really know how to react. In hindsight I definitely should have taken the situation more seriously. The problem is recognising that there is an emergency. It was a good one or two minutes before my dad got us to move, and it is not hard to imagine some of the workers in the World Trade Centre during Sep 11 looking a bit confused, looking at each other and deciding what to do before they realize that a plane has just hit the floors above them. Self consciousness can also be an issue; one might not want to look like a panicky idiot although the situation requires you to react. The morale of story, always be on the cautious side. Who cares if your friends laugh at you later, I know it sounds clichéd but it’s always ‘better to be safe than sorry’. Be cautious or learn the hard way like my dad (he lost his gf and a few cousins when he was younger, a riptide swept them all off, he was lucky)


Currently the death toll is somewhere around 23000, all that one can hope for is that their souls are resting in peace.




Ok now to more light-hearted things. My holiday was a blast, I love Thailand. A place of hedonistic pleasures: good food, good massages, good beaches (not Bangkok), cheap stuff very hot girls (and no andre I didn’t go and pay for any services you pervert). I realise I get a major kick from bargaining. Like I will be damn happy if I bring something down to 700baht from 1000baht even though I probably could have got for 300baht. It’s a case of someone feeling damn pro despite having no skill at all hahaha. Thailand rocks (quite literally yesterday hahahaha, sorry laughing at my own jokes again bye)!