Out on a Date...with a Thai!

Part of the luxury of working here at the resort is that I am provided with a place to stay (a modest room in the staff housing building) and three meals a day (which are served in the staff 'canteen'). When I first took the job, I had my sights set high, thinking I was going to be able to dine on the same extraordinarily healthy 'spa cuisine' that is served to the guests at the resort. WRONG. The food in the canteen is typical Thai fare, which in my opinion, has some good aspects and some bad...I've never exactly been one of those people who LOVES Thai food. (All of you Thai cuisine aficionados reading this, I can already imagine the aghast look on your face after reading this. Sorry! That’s just the way I feel!) The food is prepared in a typical cafeteria style manner.... massive amounts of food cooked in gargantuan pots, and frying pans filled with way more grease than I would ever use in my own kitchen throughout my entire lifetime…sitting all day under heat lamps. So as I walk into the canteen each day, I usually think to myself, ‘thank God for the salad bar.’

Anyway, so here I am, day after day, walking into the staff canteen and doing my best to create a healthy meal and a pleasant eating experience for myself. I used to take my meals upstairs onto the roof, to be able to enjoy a quiet and peaceful meal outside…until I was told about the rule that no food is to be taken outside of the canteen. (Crazy, huh?! Here I am living amongst the beauty of the sunshine and warmth of the tropics, and yet I literally have to fight to find time in my day to get outside. Trust me, my colleagues and I tried to fight this one but there are so many, in my opinion, ridiculous rules around here for us staff that it’s hard to create a proposal to change each one of them! We are just happy that the gym isn’t locked up twice a day anymore and it’s actually open from 6am to 9pm now.)

So lately, I have begrudgingly obeyed. I have eaten my meals in the pea green painted canteen, amongst the cacophony of conversation, the blaring television with who knows what going on (its in Thai of course), and my body shivering due to the blasting air conditioning. I could sit at one of the two tiny outside patio tables adjacent to the cafeteria…and when I do, each bite of my food is accompanied by a fresh breath… of smoke. The smokers, of course, have been granted use of this space. (Just one of the many ironies of life, isn’t it? Here I am at this ‘5 Star HEALTH Resort’ and who gets granted the FRESH AIR in which to enjoy their meals? The SMOKERS.)

Anyway, I still usually walk in with my typical Jody exuberance and give a big smile to the cooks. There is this one young guy who on a good day might say hello. I must be invisible to the older guy though because he has not acknowledged my presence once in the, let me guess, 739 times that I’ve walked into that cafeteria over these past 9 months. The older woman smiles back at me I’d say about 50% of the time, and the other half of the time, she seems to be too busy to smile. But a few months back, they hired a new guy. Since he started, everyday I walk in now, I am greeted with, ‘Hi Jody! How are you?!’ Don makes my day.

When he says his name, it kind of sounds like Don. I’m sure its not actually ‘Don,’ given that the Thai language uses more foreign sounds when pronouncing their words than I ever knew could even exist. So sometimes, I kind of mumble it…or change the intonation a bit…in hopes of masking the fact that I really am not sure if I’m saying it right at all. But that’s the best this English speaking girl can do. So until he corrects me, that’s what I’ll call him. “I’m great, thanks Don! How are you?!”

Don has become quite observant of my preferences. He now daily goes out of his way to serve up some sort of vegetarian alternative to the main course of the day and walks over to my table to personally serve it to me. I give him a big smile as I thank him and tell him he is wonderful. He then responds with this little childlike, shy gleaming grin as he turns away and walks back into the kitchen. (That’s one thing about the Thais, and perhaps Asians in general…my experience of them is that they are very shy. They avoid direct questions. There is a lot of bowing and smiling and superficial conversation. To this outspoken American, it’s a way of interacting that I find rather slow and unengaging…yet intriguingly challenging. Part of my enjoyment of living amongst a foreign culture is experiencing and learning other ways of being. It’s a great practice to get outside of my own belief systems about the way things ‘should’ be, and instead see an entire culture of people who live in another way. Its easy to say that ‘my way’ is better…simply because I am more familiar and comfortable with it. But that’s the great thing about travel…our belief systems of life are always challenged and resultantly, expanded.)

So the daily dread that I’ve felt when walking past the greasy options for my sustenance day after day in the canteen has now been mitigated by this much welcomed new joyful presence. “Hi Jody!” “Hi Don!” Don now makes a habit of walking around from behind the kitchen side of the food counter in order to chat with me face to face about my day. At dinner time especially, he likes to ask, “Jody, where you go?” I started to realize that this was perhaps his way of asking, “Jody, wherever you are going, may I come with you?” I’ve been practicing not being my outspoken self, and just going along as, not the leader, but the follower of the conversation.

One day he asked, “Jody, you go out to dinner?” (…which I knew likely meant, ‘Jody, we go out to dinner together?’) This particular day, after having spoken to clients hour after hour for my entire day, I really needed to just enjoy an evening without conversation, (especially without conversation in which multiple attempts are usually necessary for a simple sentence be understood). So unfortunately for him, it was the worst day he could have chosen to finally ask me out. ‘Oh, how mean of me’…. ‘oh, how cold hearted’…. I can’t even imagine how much energy he has spent over the past weeks to build up his confidence to this point. But hey, I’ve always been told that men like it when a woman plays hard to get. So without even intentionally playing the game, I replied, “Yes, I am. So I see you tomorrow!” And I smiled and walked away…

But Don, he’s a persistent one. The next day, he walked around from the back side of the kitchen counter and asked, “Jody, you like movie? You heard of funny movie in town, about rap singer who now be monk? You like to go?!” “Well, sure Don. That sounds great!” His smile had a gleam of the innocence of a twelve year old boy, full of pride for finally finding the courage to ask the girl he fancies out on a date and hearing her say ‘yes.’ (But my guess is that Don is about in his mid to late 20’s.) It was a bit of a struggle to make sure we both understood what the plan was for meeting up, but I think we succeeded.
So a few hours later, I met up with Don out in front of the movie theater (which is located by the way, on the top floor of this huge, three-story, sadly materialism-glutinous-pushing ‘mall,’ reminiscent of all the other gargantuan shopping malls that litter the landscape of every city in the western world…and are now leaching their way into Asia as well…). “Hi Don!” Hi Jody!” We exchanged some light pleasantries and walked into the theater.

Wow! How fun to be in a movie theater! It felt like I had suddenly been transported back home! (Except for the fact that I couldn’t read any of the advertisements that were flashing across the screen since they were in Thai….except that I could recognize the Pepsi symbol of course…and the Toyota one…and that worldly symbol of the golden arches….) But everything else was the same…. the big room filled with rows of comfy seats…people leaning back chomping away on popcorn. We weren’t sure if there were going to be English subtitles, but I didn’t really care. I was on a date with a Thai guy in Thailand…that was entertaining enough for me!

Right in the middle of our small talk, Don suddenly stands up and tells me to stand up too. And then I notice that everyone else is standing up as well. ‘Hmm, interesting.’ The next two or three minutes there is a tribute to the life of their King played on the screen…photos of him as a young boy in school, of his family, of he and his young wife, of him shaking hands with presumably significant people….and the crowd is singing the national anthem. ‘Cool,’ I thought. (The immense amount of devotion and respect that the Thai people have for their King is ubiquitous throughout the country. Coming from a country where presently every home in America is being inundated with advertisements bashing our top political figures, I find this extraordinarily impressive.) Then the movie starts….and yes! There are English subtitles! Don and I look at each other and smile.

I could go into the details of the movie… about the young Thai boy deciding to leave his rap band life to pursue living life as a monk…and finding himself being swept away by the wind, ripping to shreds his orange robe and sweeping away all of his belongings….and landing him in a village that was being bombarded by flying boulders due to the bad guy who keeps blowing up the mountain to extract its precious metals lying deep inside…and the monk trying to bring joy to the villagers by conducting his sermons as if singing a rap song… But, I’ll just leave it at that. The most humorous part of the movie for me was actually reading the English subtitles and realizing that whomever wrote them wasn’t exactly a fluent English speaker! For example: “Big mountain go boom! Hurt house hole roof!”

So the movie ends. We walk out together. Small talk ensues. I ask him if he is hungry. He says no. (‘Hmm, that kind of kills what normally happens next,’ I thought to myself.) He says he has to go to the hospital to get his stitches out, (he cut himself at work last week) and as he pulls his keys out of his pocket, he asks me if I want to come with him. I happened to have rented a motorbike for the week so I simply answer, “I have my own motorbike today.” “Oh, okay. Bye.” …and then Don walks away…and that is the end of our date.

I’m left standing there amongst the hoards of shoppers in the mall, by myself. It was the funniest feeling. I don’t think I’ve ever had an interaction with someone end so abruptly! I couldn’t help but stand there for a minute and kind of laugh! The next day happened to be my day off so it was like my Friday night and yet suddenly, I was out in town, standing by myself, without any plans. I called Monica. She was already in bed. I called Nadine. Her phone was off and thus was likely already asleep. I called Katrina. She didn’t answer. They’re basically all the friends I have here but they all had to work in the morning. So there I was in the mall, on a ‘Friday’ night, standing there suddenly by myself. What did I do? That is a question I find myself grappling with almost every day off. In town there are shops and there are restaurants…and that’s about it. So, I found some interesting Thai snacks to munch on and then, just walked home.

Some of you might be thinking, ‘That’s it?!’ Yep, that’s it.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit is Alive and Well in Thailand

In this time of the American economic crisis (translated to mean = Americans are finally getting smacked in the face with the truth of a most basic law of economics which is that one cannot continue to overspend on meaningless stuff which they actually cannot afford without one day realizing they must pay the bill), the looming $700 billion government bailout (translated to mean = you and me digging into our own pockets to bail out the greedy bankers and corrupt politicians), and the Presidential Debates (translated to mean = a practiced and scripted performance of ego versus rhetoric, which hardly even touches on the original purpose of discovering who is really best suited for the job)….I can’t help but be deeply impressed with the entrepreneurial spirit of the Thais. Unemployment rate spikes. Loss of jobs. No jobs available…. These statements don’t seem to bother many of the Thais. I have loved observing how many of them just go out there and create their own job. For example….

Have a car? Make a big poster with all the most famous tourist spots around town on it, including the airport and then put a sign on your dash that says, “Taxi.” Have a motorbike? Well, now you’re a motorbike taxi driver. Don’t want to be a taxi driver because you prefer a more culinary focused career? Build a storage box on your motorbike and sell any kind of snacks that you could possible think of from it, such as eggs that you bought at the store and hardboiled, fresh roasted peanuts, or a huge range of homemade snacks you bought in bulk at some mysterious outlet (because everyone seems to have the exact same ones). Build a mini bar-b-que instead and drive around selling some grilled chicken or fish balls on a stick. (Don’t ask me exactly what’s in a fish ball. From my basic biology class, I certainly don’t recall that fish have balls, per se. All I know is, they’re in the shape of a ball and stink like fish).

Alternatively, build a contraption that holds ice and sell fresh fruit, ice cream bars, or perhaps you’d like to make and sell the most popular salad in Thailand, Som tum (fresh unripe papaya with shredded carrots, green beans, and tomatoes garnished with peanuts, dried shrimp, fish sauce, lemon juice, and a bit of some mystery sugary sauce for a splash of sweetness to balance the sour of the lemon juice…I love it!)... make it fresh right there on your cart for the enjoyment of the locals and tourists alike!

Don’t have a motorbike? No problem, a regular ole’ bicycle will do just fine. (You’ll just miss out on your potential customers whom are sunbathing on the beach…. But that is fine; there are plenty of hungry customers walking around town that you can target.) Speaking of walking, don’t have a motorbike nor a bicycle? No problem, just tie a basket on each end of a stick, carry it over your shoulders, fill the baskets with local tropical fruit, freshly grilled corn, fried bananas, hard boiled eggs, roasted peanuts… whatever snack suits your fancy, and sell that! Feeling lazy and don’t really want to have to move around? No problem. Just spread out a blanket on a busy sidewalk, buy some sunglasses, ties, jewelry, or any various apparel at some bulk outlet store, display it artfully on your blanket, and sell it to passer-buyers at at least a 300% mark up. Now we’re talking!

Again, if you are desiring a more culinary focused pursuit, find a bank that closes at 5pm and then use the sidewalk in front of it to set up a full fare restaurant, fully stocked with a bar-b-que and ice boxes to keep the drinks and salad fixings cool, and open it for business starting right after the bank closes with your friends and family. With the enticing scents emanating from the bar-b-que, you’ll be sure to even get folks driving by to stop in for a bite!

Can’t find a patch of sidewalk to run your restaurant? No problem! Just use the front room of your house. Or for that matter, sell whatever you want from your house! Be a mini department store, a mini mini-mart, or even a hair salon…or a massage parlor, or a laundromat, or an alterations shop, or… Perhaps you’d prefer to work on the beach? No problem! Just set up your business in the sand under a nice big umbrella to allow for some shade for you and your customers….massages on the beach are a big hit. But hey, you could just buy a bunch of lawn chairs, lay them out nicely each morning, and then charge all the tourists on the beach to use them…meanwhile, set up a little mini-restaurant to sell snacks to your customers as they lounge away the day, willing to pay almost any price for a little snack delivered directly to their lawn chair….Doesn’t that sound nice right now?....Ahhhh….

Now, if you’re really organized, contact a few hundred other like minded entrepreneurs, approach the owner of an empty field near town, or a parking lot, or a street that doesn’t need to be used after 5pm, and set up a weekly or even nightly market, which then becomes a highlighted evening event for all. Locals and tourists alike! Set up an area with table and chairs to allow customers to enjoy a place to sit down as they eat their freshly prepared dinner with their friends and family, and then provide an endless array of items to peruse after dinner….such as knock off sunglasses, illegally copied CDs & DVDs for $5, men’s clothes, women’s clothes, lingerie (hey, why not?), shoes, postcards and mini-buddhas for the tourists, cheap house wares for the locals… If you run a farm, bring all of your meat and produce to sell, which then will allow everyone in town access to fresh, locally grown food to buy on a nightly basis. This will eliminate the need for huge, sterile, chain grocery stores spread all over town, (think: most every town in America, which sell primarily processed food in boxes or that has been picked weeks earlier and then sat for days in crates as its delivered thousands of miles away from where it was originally grown). This also makes grocery shopping a fun, evening event for the whole family, (instead of just another errand to somehow fit in).

The entrepreneurial spirit isn’t only found in the lower class… Another idea is to open up an elegant spa that you originally intended as a weekend resort for all of your wealthy friends around Thailand…but then your sharp entrepreneurial mind asks the question, “Why limit my target market to only Thais? Why not include people from all around the globe?” For your work force, hire locals, (which expect to get paid an extremely small salary…in Western terms that is) but charge extremely high prices (because hey, you’re clients probably wont look at the price much anyway). And then Voila! There you have it….an extremely well run spa with guests from all around the world, and Naturopathic Doctors who are willing to leave their home country and fly half way around the world to work at the spa! Because hey, why not?! (Then write a blog about it so everyone at home can live vicariously through the stories!) More to come!

You Can Now Call Me and Leave a VMX!

Get this. So, I have this thing called Skype on my computer, that I know some of you are, and some of you are not familiar with. To make sure we're all operating under the same knowledge base, let me explain that it allows me to use my laptop as a telephone...to call another computer or to even call a regular phone....for pennies a minute. Amazing! For those of you who also have Skype and also have a camera on your computer, then we even get to see each other when we talk....just like how it was predicted in those space age movies about the future. (Apparently, the future is NOW!) When I call computer to computer, it costs me nothing. Its FREE! When I call from my computer to a phone, wherever that phone may be, I pay something like 2 cents a minute....so an hour phone call to anywhere around the world would cost me around $1.20.

But get this! I just signed up for their newest subscription offer, and listen to this: I get unlimited calls to land lines and cell phones anywhere in the US for $6/month! But wait! There's more! AND I have a phone number! With a 206 area code! (my ole' Seattle code, of course.) That any of you can call anytime! AND leave a voice mail message for me that I can listen to once I come back to my laptop! All this for just $5.99/month! What a deal! (Imagine some cheesy advertising music playing in the background...while some guy is screaming about what a great deal this is....) So yes, that means that RIGHT NOW, at this very moment, you can call me at: 206-905-9631 and leave a message so that I can hear all of your guys' lovely voices! So cool, huh?! Now talking to you live would be even more exciting of course, but unfortunately, I am usually awake when most of you are asleep and vice versa...so I've been finding it challenging to fit time in for all of my 'Skype dates.' So this solves that!

It's my day off so of course I'm headed to the beach....and am so excited to have voice mail messages to listen to now so please call anytime! Man, this internet thing...what a trip! :-)

A Note From Paradise! (part 7 of 7): My Honeymoon with...

Wow. After rereading the past six entries about my experience here on Koh Tao, I am really blown away. I am acutely aware what a blessing it is for me to be able to be here… that my time here is but just a dream for most people in this world...three weeks to relax and be surrounded by the beauty of a tropical island…for just dollars a day. I feel such a depth of gratitude that words to fully express my appreciation don’t even exist. I am on a romantic tropical island…yet I am here by myself.

This brings me to a point I want to mention. Part of the reason why this glorious time is even possible for me is because I am single…and don’t have any kids. I am thinking of all my married friends, whom are mom’s and dad’s, reading this as you turn green with envy. But I would like to make a point…we all make choices in our lives, which open doors while at the same time, close others. I have chosen to not get married (yet!!), and to not have kids (yet?). Thus, I have the money and the freedom to spend such glorious alone time here on this little island paradise. I also have very flexible standards of living that I am comfortable in…a tent in the jungle that I share with cockroaches and spiders, to luxurious 5-star resorts. So what is on the opposite side of this coin? Well, let me tell you. I haven’t mentioned all the ants that I have befriended in my bathroom, and I can’t tell you how many nights in the past 20 years that I have been sad about being single....let me tell you: Yes, I love 'grabbing life by the horns' and experiencing all of my many adventures...but having all of these amazing adventures without someone by my side to share them with (except for my beloved time with Rick!)....well, it just gets damn old.

At first, I wondered if being on this romantic island by myself… with its sensual sunsets, its aphrodisiac scents, its honeymoon suites… was going to be irritating for me. The couples walking hand in hand on the beach, chatting and laughing as they lay next to each other in the sand, sharing a glass of wine at sunset, lets not even mention what they do after dark…Usually, these are sights that can get me all riled up….and sad…and lonely…and pitiful. But I’m very glad to say that the only time it actually bugged me was, funny enough, when I saw all the ‘couples’ hanging out together while I was snorkeling (explained back in part 5)!

But hey, there are lots of cute men here too…so maybe one of them is single? Well lets see, on about day 7, one of them joined me for lunch. Late 20’s, blond, from Switzerland, traveling by himself …seemed like a really nice guy. So we decided to have dinner together that night. He liked chatting with me…but apparently also as much as with the two Austrian girls who were sitting at the table next to us. “Jody! Do you mind if they join us?!” So I say, “Well gee. That sounds wonderful.” But of course what I really meant was, “Are you an idiot?”

Then there was the perfectly sculpted, lusciously tanned skinned, dazzling green-eyed, wonder man. I noticed him one day as he was getting out of the water after snorkeling. I made a quick scan of the surroundings for any signs indicating I should abort my mission….a ring on his wedding finger, anyone on the beach he may be looking up at whom was wearing a bikini…Nope, all was in the clear. I wasted no time. I grabbed my snorkel and headed into the water. As I casually flipped my hair around, to tie it back in preparation for snorkeling of course, I smiled at him and simply asked, “How was it?” He looked at me kind of funny so perhaps he didn’t hear me. I tried to make myself more clear, “How was the snorkeling today?” “Oh, sorry. Me no speak Engleash.” …I have never cared so much about the French I studied back in high school in my entire life, until that moment. We exchanged smiles, made some awkward hand gestures about how big the fish are, and then I put my tail between my legs so to speak and swam out into the sea.

Then there was the cute massage guy. I must admit, the Thai men are generally not my type. But this guy is really cute and sweet. I started adopting a routine that every afternoon after my daily snorkel, I would get a massage from him, and then we would give each other language lessons for a while….I teaching him English and he teaching me Thai, of course. Well, each night, it seems like he was asking me if I wanted to join him for dinner. (Not speaking each other’s language certainly makes flirting challenging….smiling and smiling and smiling, without words with clear understanding, gets old after a while…) But, I had made some friends and always had dinner plans with them. (Toots and Angela from Germany, and the Swiss guy funny enough.) However, they were going to be leaving soon…and I knew I had plenty of time here, or so I thought….so I was just going to see if an opportunity to have dinner with him would come up once they left. This went on for I’d say at least about five or six days.

Well, the very night that Toots and Angela from Germany and the Swiss guy left, I headed over for my daily indulgence of being massaged for an hour from the cute local guy (did I mention it was in a beautiful hut…on the beach…for $9?!), and then the endless flirting session. Oh whoops, I mean, language lessons. But it looks like I was too late…

When I arrived, there was some other American girl sitting there with her Thai-English dictionary teaching him English. Apparently, she wasn’t aware that I was the English teacher, and thank you very much, but I was in no need of a substitute teacher today. I sat down and introduced myself and joined in. Apparently, she was only teaching him English but didn’t know a word of Thai. So I started to chat with my Thai friends…“Sabai dee mai? Khun bai nai wanee? Wanee dee mai?” Then I looked at my cute friend and impressed him even more, “Neung song sahm see hah hok jet pbad gow sip.” Since she didn’t speak a word of Thai, it didn’t concern me in the least bit that my complex sounding sentence was simply me counting to ten. I just wanted to make sure she knew who was boss…or so I thought….

As the no-longer-a-flirting-session-but-language-lesson-competition went on, I soon realized that no matter how much Thai I showed off with, I was clearly in second place…The story goes like this: Apparently this lady, Mindy is her name, was here three months ago…and she and the massage guy hit it off. (His name is Jaran by the way…or perhaps more like Jahrun, or Jaaruhn, or Chalun….You see, the Thai’s don’t use these same letters that I’m sitting here typing with. They have an entirely different alphabet…with entirely different sounds than are used in our language….So to write his name using these letters is simply my attempt at trying to match the sound that is produced when he says his name.) So Mindy and, lets say Jaran, hung out for days back in April and even ended up traveling around Thailand together for a week or so. Well, Mindy is a teacher in California and was on spring break, so she had to eventually head back home. But now she is on summer break and arrived back here on Koh Tao to do some more traveling with Jaran. Long story short, I quickly accepted my place in this triangle and have enjoyed the past week hanging out with Jaran AND Mindy, who both left today to do some more traveling around Thailand.

Do you see the lesson here? The lesson that I see is that, this month is not about me having a romantic, tropical island fling. This month, exactly as I intended it to be, is about me unwinding, letting go of residual stress of med school that has still been hanging around, resting my body, rejuvenating my mind…I’ve decided to call it: My Honeymoon with Myself. Throughout my trip here, I’ve been reading my fabulous Aunt Mary’s book, The Gift of Our Compulsions (which refers to not just the obvious ones but also a compulsion to over-think, over-work, over-struggle, over-stay-busy…). It’s all about learning to live peacefully within our own mind, regardless of what is going on on the outside. Today is my last full day here and I just finished the last page this morning at breakfast…such perfect timing. It has been my most perfect companion. Each day I have transformed old thoughts of struggle, into compassion and love for myself….So you see, the perfect title for my time here is: My Honeymoon with Myself.

And so now, for one last time before I leave tomorrow, I’m off to go nourish my body with some scrumptious delights at the beachside restaurant, be dazzled by the glorious sights of life in the sea, and then enjoy a nap in my ocean view hammock. Thank you for sharing my month long journey in paradise with me…Of course, more to come later on as my journey living and working in Thailand continues. Bye for now. ☺

A Note From Paradise! (part 6 of 7): What about the Turtles on ‘Turtle Island?!’

“You are on ‘Turtle Island’ Jody! Tell us about all the wondrous TURTLES!!!” Well, I wish I could. A very sad thing about reality here is, guess what life from is not visible in the waters around ‘Turtle Island?’ Yep, you guessed it: turtles. To get a name like ‘Turtle Island,’ of course at one time there were hundreds of them frolicking around these waters. Well, turtles aren’t to be seen anywhere around the island anymore…not a one.


The influx of tourists over the last 20 years has made life here impossible for them. They’ve either been killed or scared away. Too many boats and all the people moving around in the sea send them away in search of more peaceful surroundings. Furthermore, all the action on the beaches deprives the turtles of the necessary peaceful areas in the sand in which to lay their eggs. And then there are the effects of toxins in the water and the prevalent use of my favorite friend: plastic (not!)…


On a good note, I have been very impressed with how many, ‘What You Can Do to Preserve the Reef,’ posters I have seen around, listing simple ecofriendly tips for travelers, such as: Avoid the use of plastic products and bags (nearly 90% of marine debris is plastic, which does NOT biodegrade; it just breaks apart into tiny pieces which the fish don’t realize is poison as they nibble away on it); Don’t throw your butts on the ground! (the filters in cigarettes are made of plastic and other toxins so when they make their way into the sea, fish and turtles mistake them for food and then unable to digest it, they die; not to mention the other toxins dissipating into the sea poisoning even more marine life); Buy locally made goods to support the livelihood of the locals (ie, avoid shopping at the ever pervasive 7-11’s on every corner…yes, even here in Thailand…I just read there are 3800 here in this little country); Dispose of trash properly (every year 6 million TONS of trash is deposited in our oceans, and 80% originates as litter which ends up there simply from being propelled from land via wind and water runoff; consequently, 100,000 marine animals such as dolphins, whales, seals, and turtles choke or become entangled every year)… This is Bad News people!!! PLEASE do your part to prevent this, even from where you live, today.


There is a wonderful collaboration amongst the many dive shops on the island to spread environmental awareness to all of their customers. Donation boxes abound for tourists to give towards the local’s efforts to preserve the reef. They are raising money to build a BioRock, an electronic reef structure that uses low voltage current to cause minerals to dissolve out of seawater. (Optimal conditions are thrown out of balance by the pollution and sewage that is dumped into the sea from all over the world.) This creates more optimal growth conditions; coral, sponges, and clams have been shown to grow 3-5 times faster when in close proximity to the BioRock structure. Growth has also been shown to be enhanced in areas with decreased water quality. For more info on this fabulous project, go to: www.MarineConservationKohTao.com


I’d like to take this moment to say YOORAH!! for the many worldwide efforts to preserve this wondrous, breath-taking beautiful planet that serves as home to ALL of us. What small positive difference can you make today?…Thank you!!!

A Note From Paradise! (part 5 of 7): Swimming Amongst the Tropical Fish!

…Now onto describe the tropical fish! From the second I step foot into the ocean, I have swarms of fish circling around me. The ones at the beach are always the silver stripped mid-sized ones. Apparently, they are the smartest ones in the ‘school’… They have figured out that if, instead of darting away in fear from these big blobs of life clamoring around in their home, they actually befriend these clumsy, finless, buffoons, and swim close to them in the shallow water, they will be able to enjoy little nuggets of tasty delights thrown directly at them! One tip I learned the other day, from first hand experience nonetheless, was that I must be careful to not stand in the shallow water too long unless I have some of my own little nuggets to share with them, or else they start nibbling on me!

So I quickly swim past the smart kids and head out to see whom else I can meet. First of all, when I think of tropical fish, what comes to mind is all of those brilliantly colored little ones that I see swimming around in a fish tank in the lobby of some fancy restaurant. I had no idea that ‘tropical fish,’ in their vibrant reds, blues, and greens could be as big as salmon! I kid you not! Then, I even saw a school of these guys…about 20 of them swimming along next to me staring me down, asking each other if they should dart away or if it was cool to just stare at this strange beast for a while…Luck for me, they chose the later.

I have seen many ‘schools’ of fish in my days of snorkeling but today took my breath away. As I swam up to a school of my favorite dark-and-light-silver-stripped,-with-a-bit-of-yellow-on-the-top,-about-6-inches-long ones, I stopped just to watch them for a while. They seemed as interested in me as I was in them. One-by-one they would swim directly straight towards my mask and we would make eye contact for a moment, as if introducing ourselves, before he (or she? or are all fish ‘its?’) swam away to give the next guy a turn. Before I knew it, I wasn’t just looking at a school of fish, but I was entirely engulfed by them….I spun around and there were hundreds of them; to my left; to my right; underneath me…As they swam about, the sunlight shining down on them created the appearance of a field of sparkling diamonds. Wow. I was in such awe… I just stayed there for ages, floating, and floating, and floating...amongst a sea of tropical fish. Before my mind could decide that it had found its new home and that I was never going to leave the presence of this magical life in the sea, I swam on.

Ahead of me was another school of fish but these guys were tadpole size. Instead of the outer boundaries of their ‘school’ morphing into a range of circular shapes (such as resembling a whale, to fool any potential predators that that is exactly what they were, camouflaging the reality of their perfect little snack sized body), these little guys were packed together like a freight train moving along in front of me. I literally stopped, as if waiting at a railroad crossing, before swimming onward. I waited…and waited…and waited….I started to count the seconds!…25 seconds…35 seconds…45 seconds…I started to wonder if this freight train of tadpoles even had a caboose!! Amazingly, an end appeared and the lights turned from red to green, the barriers were lifted, and I swam on.

As I looked straight down, it seemed that the ‘floor’ was moving. But then I realized that once again, I was witnessing one of the largest schools of fish I had ever seen. They were sand colored so without a close focus, it literally looked like the ground was vibrating with movement. In actuality, it was hundreds of fish all swimming along together, forming a blanket covering the ocean floor.

Then there are the brilliant yellow butterfly fish that flit about all day long, except at about 5pm. Apparently ‘Couple’s Hour’ is around then…because every day that I snorkel at that time, I see pairs of these guys just floating lovingly next to each other…not trying to dart here or there, not nibbling on the coral…just admiring each other as they float motionless. When I first saw this, I felt like I was invading their privacy and wanted to say, “ Oh, pardon me.” But when they didn’t seem to mind, I decided to join in…so I just stop and float along with them for a while whenever I see this. But then one day, when my self-pity voice seemingly had a lot to say, as I floated along with my butterfly fish couple like a third wheel, it told me “Geez Jody, here you are on a romantic tropical island…by yourself, yet even the yellow colored fish in the sea can get a date. Where’s yours?!” Hmm, maybe if I ‘hang’ around long enough, these guys will split up and I could catch one on the rebound…

Anyway, then there are the little, fluorescent blue ones that are so bright I have to wonder where in their body they store their battery pack….and the little black ones that look like they crashed into a rock and now their face is shaped like a box... and the ones that float around looking like ghosts with their black outline and translucent bodies…and the brightly colored polka dotted ones…and ones that have so many colors going in so many directions they resemble a piece of modern art…and the little 3 inch long squid scrambling around with all their many legs…and the ones that dart about chasing each other like little kids playing tag on the playground…and the Crocodile-Needle fish that are as scary looking as their name suggests and can often be up to two or three feet long (yet I have been assured both times that I’ve asked that they are harmless… but then I read in a fish book that they have caused fatalities to fisherman that scare them at night with their bright lights…hmm…)… and then there are the elegant white, yellow, and black ‘ladies’ that strut around with their long, elegant, white ‘scarf’ extending from the top of their head to beyond the end of their body, with it swaying here and there as they shimmer by…and then…and then…and then…

To be swimming along so peacefully as a visitor in this vibrant underworld takes my breath away everyday. So let me take a moment to put a plug in…for those of you whom have never gone snorkeling or scuba diving, I strong suggest you make a point of doing so sometime in your lifetime. It’s like visiting another planet, vibrantly alive with hundreds of different, colorful, and exciting life forms…that come in so many various shapes, and sizes…incomparable to any life form seen here above sea level….yet, its not another planet; it’s life right here on earth.

All of this wonder and amazement is visible to me within seconds of stepping off this beach that I have been blessed to be at for the last two weeks. At times, I dive down deep below the surface and pretend I am at home; that I am just one of the many creatures that live in the sea. It’s trippy to look up at the surface of the ocean and watch the ripples from the underside. Yesterday, the water was so crystal clear blue that at times, I literally forgot I was immersed in the sea… I seriously had the thought jump into my mind a few times when admiring a fish, ‘Wow, he is floating in thin air.’ Furthermore, it was a perfect day for snorkeling…The sun was beaming down through the surface of the water which made absolutely everything sparkle. I became witness to the most organic laser light show in the world, fueled by nothing more than the light of the sun and the vibrant colors of sea life.

So here I am, in this very moment, looking down upon the sea from the deck of my little bungalow, exposing to all of you the wonders of its treasures that lie beneath while swinging in this hammock…and I’m realizing, ‘What am I doing up here, in air? It’s time to go dive down, into the sea!’ So more stories to come tomorrow…Bye for now!

A Note From Paradise! (part 4 of 7): The Exquisite Coral!

…So after ‘breakfast,’ it’s often about noon, which is the heat of the day. Going to the beach would be a very hot and potentially burning option…so I usually opt to head back to swing in the shade of my hammock and read. I’m reading my fabulous Aunt Mary’s book, The Gift of Our Compulsions. She teaches the most brilliant approach to living peacefully within our bodies and minds that I have ever come across… (but I’m trying to stay on task, so more about that later).

As I sway in my hammock, I periodically close my eyes and visualize letting go of the stress I have been carrying around in my body for who knows how many years….the tightness in my neck and shoulders, the knot in my shoulder blades that burns now and then, the ache in my low back, the tension in my belly… Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Geez Jody, its not like you’ve been a soldier at war.’ Yes, you are correct. I have not been living my life on a battlefield. But I’m not interested in living my life comparing myself to others. Each person’s experience of life is made up of an exquisitely unique string of events that shape one’s perspective of absolutely everything one encounters. Also, one’s insides rarely match that which shows on the outside, so we rarely know the truth of another’s experience in reality anyway. And lastly, one’s experience of ‘easy’ might be another’s experience of ‘hard,’ and vice versa…. So what good is comparing anything to anyone, anyway? (Hmm, did that sound defensive? Perhaps it was a bit of my own self-doubt coming out…or that voice so common in our society that says, ‘You don’t deserve that, given the many people less fortunate then you in the world.’…Yah, that makes sense. So lets just all make sure we don’t enjoy life too much.)

Interesting…the word ‘digression’ just came to mind. That’s seems a bit strange, doesn’t it? I wonder where that came from? Hmm… Anyway, as I was saying. I spend the early afternoon swaying in my hammock, reading, watching, napping… By about 2 pm, my body is ready to move. I stroll down the stairs until my feet land in the sand, spit into my snorkel mask and rinse it in the sea, (a fabulous tip from my brilliant Grandfather Irving to keep my mask from fogging up, taught to me during our many precious years vacationing together in Hawaii throughout my childhood), and then jump in and off I go, to explore the beauty of life in the sea!

The coral is stunning! So many different shapes and sizes… The huge round balls covered entirely with little squiggly, colorful lines creating the appearance of a gigantic brain; the bright green, circular ‘platters,’ stretching 6 feet in diameter with every inch of their surface covered by ‘fingers’ that stick straight up; the purple ‘cauliflower’ heads that range from tiny to gargantuan; the various shapes that look like a furry terry cloth bathrobe that has been thrown into a pile on the floor; the piles of ‘deer antlers’ with their sharp projections pointing in every which way; the humble ‘plants’ with broad, flat ‘leaves’ that curve around a single united core; the ‘flower bouquets’ with their intricately designed ‘flowers.’… And the vista of it all together!

When I first leave the beach, I see a flat expanse of various shapes and colors. But then as I continue to swim out, I come to a point where I suddenly feel like I’ve just peeked over the edge of a ten-story building and down below is an entire city of life! Big, multicolored boulders standing tall like proud castles; stunning coral that fans out from a vertical edge like a perplexing piece of modern art; barren parts of white sand acting like the city’s central park; bright green ‘branches’ that are stacked on top of each other and branch out, resembling a magnificent bonsai tree; the green splatter that looks like it was created by being shot out of a paint gun… The amazing thing about coral is that to the untrained eye, it just looks like colored rocks. Not true!! Coral is ALIVE! When you look closely at one of these magnificent pieces of life, you realize that its actually covered in thousands of tiny spores, pulsating with life. (It is not to be touched however, because the transfer of bacteria from human touch can actually kill it.)…But that’s just the coral!

Other various life forms abound!…Vibrantly colored ‘clams’ somehow buried deep into the coral so that the only part that comes into view is their fluorescent colored ‘lips’ opening and closing upon the surface of the coral; the one to two foot long, jumbo sized ‘hot dogs’ in their various colors and textures that basically look exactly like huge terds, but are fondly known as sea cucumbers; edges of ‘buildings’ decorated with these tiny bright red, bright blue, and bright green fuzzy balls, seemingly with 2 little black ‘eyes’ (reminiscent of those fuzzy ended pencils with eye balls amongst their frizz) that suddenly somehow retract and disappear into the rock when I come close; the ‘floating spider webs’ that just hang around as if Spiderman had just cast his net out creating them (I’m told its plankton); individual pieces of deep purple colored ‘spaghetti,’ all sticking straight up from the base of a rock floating back and forth in unison like Bob Marley’s dreadlocks, swaying to the beat of their favorite song, “What a Glorious Day in the Sea;” …but that’s not even the half of it! Let me tell you about all the tropical fish!

…But as you all well know by now, I am very empathetic to those of you with short attention spans and I think this entry is getting a bit long. So I will delight you with the rest of this amazing experience, in my next entry…Until then!