Friday, October 14th

We had to wait for the travel agent to open at 8:30 in order to book our flights, but we got up, had breakfast and began to prepare to leave. When 8:30 finally came, the receptionist made our call for us and this is when we discovered that there were no flights available that day. I suppose we should have forseen this since the floods made flying the only option if you had to travel south. There were seats available the next day but we couldn't book them over the phone, so we hurried down to the agency where I discovered that those flights were also filling up fast. I grabbed the first option I could, which wasn't until the next evening and which would squeeze our beach time considerably. At this point though I was mainly concerned with getting south of the flooding so that we wouldn't miss our final flight out of Bangkok. I figured that if something happened to the Bangkok airport between now and the 20^th, we would be able to work something out, but if we missed our flight because of poor planning it would be a different story.

As soon as I was assured we had a ticket out of sukothai I began to relax a little. I was still a bit anxious that our flight might get cancelled, but I figured we'd done what we could. The travel agency was beginning to fill up with customers at this point, one of whom was a little girl who became enamored with me the moment she walked in. since I was a white person and since white people generally teach English, she assumed I must be an English teacher and decided to practice her English on me. “Thaaaaank yoooouuuu teeeeaaaacheeerrr,” she repeated over and over. It just about killed me it was so cute. I tried to ask her what her name was (in Thai) but she got confused and started asking me what my name was. Then she pretended to be a butterfly. As we left the agency I heard her tell her mom in Thai, “Teacher's going home.” she waved goodbye and I felt considerably less stressed due to the encounter.

Now we had an extra day in sukothai and had to figure out what to do with it. There was another historical park further from the city and the hotel manager (who was a really nice guy) recommended we go there. We had nothing better to do so we went and it was really pretty cool. You could tell it wasn't as popular of a destination and that it was the low season because we were probably the only tourists around. As we approached the park I heard the vendors tell each other “foreigners are coming!”

Again we rented bicycles and cycled around a mostly deserted park. Both my parents seemed to agree that this day was even better than the one before it, so it turned out that our delay was a good thing. There were some truly impressive ruins at this park, which at times seemed pretty removed from civilization. I felt like some sort of 19th century explorer as I climbed overgrown steps up to temple ruins, surrounded by the calls of exotic birds and the musty smell of jungle vegetation. But 19th century explorers didn't have convenient paved paths, old-fashioned one-speed bicycles, or an ice cream cooler waiting for them at the end of the day.