At the beach.

I've got less than a week left, and I was bored of Bangkok. I decided to go to Chiang Mai, an 11-hour overnight sleeper train away, in the north of Thailand. It's the home of lots of indigenous hill tribes, a very pleasant city from what I'm told, and you can ride elephants.

I'd ride an elephant.

Chiang Mai turns out to be an exceedingly popular place. So much so that I can't get a ticket. They try to get me to get the VIP bus, which I have to imagine is not so VIP at all.

I go south, instead, and opt for the beach, which I haven't seen since Nha Trang, Vietnam. I figure I should come home with something of a tan line.

Most tourists, I think, go to Phuket (poo-kett) or Ko Samui or Ko Phi Phi (which is entertainingly enough pronounced like "go pee pee"). They've very crowded and popular. And far.

Hua In is a beach town aboiut 4 hours away by bus. Perfect. It's a popular weekend getaway for young Thais and their families. And Germans.

So. Many. Germans.

Seriously, if there's a quaint little beach town to be found, the Germans find it. And move in. And open restaurants.

I met Kim and Carla on the bus. They're sisters- Carla is taking a year off from work to volunteer and travel the world and Kim is a HS science and math teacher, visiting for a couple of weeks. The bus, which is a lot more ghetto than I expected, no suspension whatsoever, making me a hell of a lot more queasy than I normally get on a perfectly flat and straight highway, pulls over. They're talking to a Thai guy who speaks enough English to tell them that they'd better get off the bus and check underneath. The drivers forgot to lock the storage area, and some of the luggage flew out. They were safe, as was I. I had my two HUGE bags in Bangkok at the hotel I'm returning to, and my two smaller bags under my feet. Paranoia pays off in this instant. Some English woman not as lucky... her bag flew out of the bus. She doesn't seem to bothered. Weird.

We walk for about 8 minutes to the edge of the little town. It's dense with tourist shops, of the tailoring and Buddha-head variety. More 7-11's, a starbucks, a McDonald's with Ronald McDonald wai-ing at the entrance. Yet, it feels less Westernized than you'd think.

It's perfect. A beach, a little town to walk around, a night market, open-air restaurants that have no menus in English.

We find a guesthouse that's recommended to us by some people we met, and I negotiate an AC room, with fridge and shower, the most comfortable bed I've had in Thailand yet (not saying much- they're hard as fuck) for $18 a night. It's right on the water. There's a deck overlooking the water, and it has that laid-back, "I've been here for 60 years and it looks exactly the same" kind of way, and the people who work there are delightful. Glamourous it's not, (the floor is laid with contact paper that look like pergo tiles....) but really, it's brilliant. I hear the ocean crashing against the shore as I go to sleep. No joke.

I've been here a day and a half, but I've yet to see the sun.

However, it's so relaxed here, and the weather is cool and comfortable, and I've had lots of time to sit, read, watch TV, and relearn intergration by parts and partial fractions.

There's a ton of bars, and they're full of "bar girls," the gentle way to describe the prostitutes. Not much offends me, but I'm really grossed out by all these Western men who are walking around with their Thai "girlfriends." There's no shame, and you know that they're coming to Thailand strictly for the sex tourism.

The girls and I walked across the beach for a couple of hours, played with mini sand crabs (1/4 of the size of a fingernail) and lamented the death of an enormous jellyfish that washed up on shore. Huge and gross.

A couple of more days here, a few more chapters of calculus, and I'll be more than ready to head back to Bangkok to come home.

I can't wait.