Day 76 - Happy New Year!

Well that was a lot of fun. We had an awesome New Year's Eve, starting with waking up in my incredibly hot tent, then going up to Nancy and Jessie's temple to give food to the monks (Nancy and Jessie own Irie Bar, where I'm staying). When we got there, about 12 of us in all, including Puppy. We went in, gave them their food, and were all blessed (for want of a better word) in turn, while the monks chanted and we had water flicked over us, while the dogs fought around us. It was a pretty good way to spend a morning. Afterwards we raced back to town for as shopping excursion - they have a sort of secret Santa thing on new year's eve here, which we were all involved in, with a 200 baht budget - and then on to a nearby cafe which has 116 types of healing tea. It was then time to go and get Kate from the bus station, which we sort of succeeded in doing.

We had a BBQ back at the Irie (which Chris burnt a lot of), and exchanged presents, let off paper lanterns (which the town is now strewn with, the next morning), which looked amazing, and then realised we had done it too early and let off another load at midnight. After this we hopped on bikes to head out to Monkey bar, run by another member of the Irie crew, Pong. This was in the middle of a little cluster of bars just out of town, and was a bit odd - it was only really people who lived or worked at Irie in there, and Pong shut the doors pretty early, trapping us inside. Most of us then went on to a party down by the river, with quite rubbish music, for a bit of a dance. I bought some food, which turned out to be cold noodles with really spicy chicken on top, with a bag of garlic fried insects on the side. I'm not too sure why I bought the insects, I only managed about four spoonfuls before I threw them away - it wasn't the taste, they were just like tiny shell-on prawns, but the texture and number of legs, mainly. They kept getting caught down the side of my gums, where I couldn't easily fish them out.

We went on to Don't Cry Bar for some better food but the kitchen was closed (it was 3 am on new year's day, I don't know why we were surprised) so we just hung out in the hammocks. When we tried to return to the party we found that the Police had shut it down, possibly for noise, so we returned home on foot (I think) as someone else had already taken the Mopeds, and it was probably inadvisable for any of us to drive home.