Emily and Mitchell in the USA

  We flew straight from Phuket to Hong Kong and arrived in the late afternoon. The subway was easy to use, but our apartment was not! Luckily someone had put a picture on Google Maps of the entrance to a small shopping mall, so we headed in, passing small independent spice shops and minimarts. From there, the only directions we had was 2F/11F, so we tried the second floor. Nothing looked like a guesthouse, so we were wandering around a little lost when someone who must live in the building took a look at the address and sent us towards an elevator which I hadn't seen before.  We went up to the 11th floor and found the right door. We called the buzzer and after a while, a guy came down from the floor above to let us in and grab our key. He then took us down to the 8th floor and let us into a guesthouse with a completely different name out front. But he was very nice and once we were in it, our room was very pleasant with a private bathroom and a kettle and microwave in the comm...

We flew from Chiang Mai to Thailand's biggest island, Phuket.  After our long day of travel the day before, we had a day on Kata beach to recover. It was nice, but very busy, and in a surprising turn of events, full of Russian families. So much so that all the menus and signs were in English, Thai and Russian, and sometimes exclusively in Russian.  Soon after we arrived on the beach, it started to drizzle. This didn't deter me and I decided if I was getting wet I might as well go swimming. The water was nice and warm, and I didn't get shivery at all. When we came out of the water after our quick dip, the drizzle had become big drops and was only getting harder. We quickly packed up and made the 8 minute walk back to our hotel. During this walk, it was raining so heavily that we were completely soaked through and had to wring our clothes out before we could hang them up to dry.  We stayed inside for a bit, but in the afternoon it cleared up and we spent it lying on the bea...

We arrived in Bangkok after an overnight flight through Singapore. We'd found the snooze lounge and had gotten a couple of hours sleep in the airport, but it clearly wasn't enough. We went to a food court in a mall for some lunch and then when we could check into our hostel we went for a quick nap that accidentally lasted until 10pm, at which point we decided to just call it a night and went to bed. We slept until the morning and then headed out, well rested now, to explore Bangkok.  Our first stop was some food, so we went to the morning market which was very close by. There were lots of very small street food vendors selling fresh grilled fish and bags of spices for cooking. We got some egg rotis and took them to the park to eat. The park was filled with retired people taking exercise classes, power walking and meeting friends. It was already so hot at 8am, so we could see why they were all taking advantage of this slightly cooler start to the day.  We then decided to go bac...