A Weekend in Pitsanoluk

 This past weekend we went to Pitsanulok. We went Saturday on the 10:00 train and came home on the 1:45 Sunday train.  We thought we’d go see a movie in English and go to the night market!  We were excited about both of those things.  We didn’t end up doing either… I’m getting ahead of myself.

At the train station we ran into a group of soldiers.  We got a picture.  There are more soldiers around.  That's the only difference I have noticed since the political unrest--more soldiers.

When we got off the train we looked at the map they have there at the station.  We knew that there was a movie theatre that the volunteers in that city had seen.  They told us it was by the Tesco.  The problem we faced was that there were 2 Tescos and we didn’t know which one it was by.  We stood there discussing what to do for quite some time.  We talked to someone who knew a little English and they thought our best bet was going to Central Plaza—a mall and shopping center.  We thought that sounded like a good idea, but weren’t sure about the movies there.  The English teachers who had seen a movie has specifically told us they had gone to the theater by Tesco.  We stood by the map debating for another chunk of time.  After trying to decide for far too long what we should do a man approached us.  “Do you need help?” he asked us in perfect English.  YES!  We told his that we wanted to see a movie but weren’t sure where to go, that we thought it was by Tesco but other people had told us that Central Plaza would be a better choice but we weren’t sure about the movies being in English.  He said he wasn’t sure about the movies, but asked some Thai teenagers nearby and they said Central Plaza was the place to go!  We bargained a price with the tuktuk driver.  He thought the price was far too low, but when we decided to just take the bus instead and walked away he agreed (unhappily) on our price.  We got to Central Plaza and just looking a the signs of what awaited made us incredibly happy: McDonalds, Dairy Queen, The Pizza Company, Auntie Anne’s Pretzels!  Western food and treats make us really happy.  

I love fun bathroom signs!

We walked in and it was big and clean and cold and full of delicious foods.   We kept wanting to stop but we decided it was best to go check on movie times before we did anything else.  We went to the theatre and the line was sooo long! Stevie pulled out her phrase book and opened to the ‘entertainment’ section.  We asked if the movies were in English or had English subtitles.  After a lot of pointing and finding another English speaker we got the information we needed. They were showing 2 movies: Spiderman and King someone (don’t remember).  Spiderman is what we were hoping to see.  It was dubbed in to Thai and did NOT have any subtitles.  The movie about the king was in Thai and had English subtitles.  We didn’t care to see the movie about an ancient king (it’s the 5^th in a series) and weren’t thrilled about reading subtitles either.  So we left the theatre and decided to have lunch.  There were a lot of tasty choices and we settled on The Pizza Company.  It.was.amazing!  I got a garden salad (they don’t really have green salad here) and shared a Hawaiian pizza with Lindsie.

After lunch we window shopped until we had enough room in our bellies for DQ.  I got a medium chocolate brownie blizzard.  The large blizzard here is about the size of a small in the states.  I think it was 12 oz and cost between $1 and $1.50. 

There was a market on the ground floor of the mall (The mall is 4 stories tall) and we spend time there wandering, looking, and sampling.  The brownies and rice/caramel treats were good.  The egg yolk sticky treat was horrible. 

 The second from the top is crabs--still in the shells.

There they are up close.

Look at eyes on this mannequin! 

So scary!

They have a store that looks and feels just like the Apple store.  It was labeled as an apple retail resale store called iStudio.  We sent in there and looked around.

This phone case was at the iStudio store.

Then we walked around a little more and a couple girls got soft pretzels and lemonade from Auntie Anne’s.  

We wanted to go to our hotel but we weren’t sure where it was.  Van (the school director of the school in Pitsanoluk) booked the hotel for us.  It belongs to her aunt and all we knew was it was her aunt’s hotel and it was old.  I had really low expectations and thought it’d be like one of the review we read online of another old hotel: “used to be in a nice field by a pond, but now it’s a mosquito filled swamp.”  We sat around for far too long waiting.  We had called Van to get the info about the hotel.  We had facebooked the girls at the other school to see if they could have Van call us.  We sat at the movie theater for about an hour waiting to hear back about our hotel.  After an hour Megan finally realized that was what we were waiting for and said, “I have the information about the hotel!”  She didn’t know that’s what we were waiting for.  We headed back to the Apple (not Apple) store to use the computers to get directions to the hotel.  While we were in there a worker come over and asked us to play a game with her.  She had an exercise app she wanted us to use.  You hold the iPhone and do 20 squats.  It times you to see how fast you do them.  They gave us pins for participating and entered us in to a contest to win a couple prizes.

The app screen for the squatting game. 

Our hotel was actually pretty good.  It cost us $5 each and was clean AND had AC!  

We checked in, relaxed, and rested our feet for about an hour.  Then we thought we would grab a bite to eat and head to the night market!  We were SO so excited about that.  We ate at a plaza across from our hotel called “Big C”.  I got corn soup, Caesar salad, chicken and fries. Surprisingly the soup was the best part of the meal.  After we ate we went to take a tuktuk to the night market.  Is started to drizzle and the tuktuk driver wouldn’t take us.  We gathered that maybe it was cancelled because of the light rain. But we weren’t sure…  We were feeling disappointed since that was the MAIN reason we were there.  We were also frustrated because we weren’t totally sure that it was cancelled.  I threw my head back and loudly said, “Does anyone speak English?!”  Not 10 seconds later someone walked over and raised their hand.  Thank you universe!  He let us know that they close the market if/when it starts to rain.  We decided that since we couldn’t go to the market we’d go walk around Big C.  There was a store and shops inside.  Most of them closed at 9:00 and we headed back to our hotel before 10:00.  The girls and I stayed up talking for a bit then headed to bed.  

The next morning we didn’t have to leave until 8:30 (we usually have to leave the school before 6:30 on Sunday to get to church).  Church was lovely.  There was a baptism.  We took the train home and it was a good weekend even though it turned out differently than we expected.