Fellow travelers
When you spend a week at a resort, you begin to see some of the same people over and over again. After a while (if you're us, anyway) you start wondering what their story is and maybe (again, if you're us) you come up with shorthand ways to refer to them. These were some of the regulars we identified:
The Couple: An extremely large middle-aged man accompanied by a young, slender and beautiful Asian woman with no apparent verbal communication taking place between them. Make your own assumptions about may have been going on there.
Spiral: A middle-aged (French, we think) and not especially attractive woman who wore a bathing suit consisting of a thong and a bikini with material that spiraled into dots that barely covered her nipples. Oh, and she also spent much of the time topless, in a place where modesty is a virtue. Ewwww.
The Russians: Every morning we would go down to the pool near our room and shortly thereafter a family of five Russian speakers would show up--one older couple, one younger couple, and what appeared to be a teenage daughter. Notable not only because they were perpetually smoking, but also because one day they shattered the idyllic calm by cranking up a CD player of loud, grating pop music while dancing in the pool. Have you ever been at a concert, or maybe in a movie, where people all of a sudden talk so loudly that you can't concentrate on anything else? Similar deal.
The Norwegers: A ruggedly attractive family of blondes who spoke a Nordic language of some sort. Not sure if they were actually from Norway, but close enough.
The Boys: Three young boys wearing matching blue rashies (swim shirts) and snorkel masks who spent every waking minute in the pool.
The Dudes: Muscle-bound gay couple with pierced nipples. (Which reminds me, I can't believe we forgot to send a postcard to The Boys! Next time.)
The Brits: There were two very nice older British couples we met one day at the beach when one of them asked if we had found her sunglasses. One of the women took a particular interest in Gretchen's pregnancy, to the extent that every time we saw her she would ask if we had picked a name yet because she simply had to know. That's the kind of thing that could be really obnoxious, but she was really quite sweet about it so no worries (and luckily we managed to duck the name thing each time she brought it up).
The Americans: I'll say this--we were stunned by how many Americans there were in general. Granted, it was an American hotel chain, but I don't think of Phuket as being a place many Americans go for holiday. Our guess was that a lot of them may have been expats living in Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo, etc. The presence of lots of Americans is often a major downer, but at least in this case the obnoxiousness quotient was fairly low.
(Meanwhile, someone somewhere is probably blogging about the pregnant lady who wouldn't get out of the pool and her strange husband who would go to extraordinary lengths to stay out of the sun.)
The Couple: An extremely large middle-aged man accompanied by a young, slender and beautiful Asian woman with no apparent verbal communication taking place between them. Make your own assumptions about may have been going on there.
Spiral: A middle-aged (French, we think) and not especially attractive woman who wore a bathing suit consisting of a thong and a bikini with material that spiraled into dots that barely covered her nipples. Oh, and she also spent much of the time topless, in a place where modesty is a virtue. Ewwww.
The Russians: Every morning we would go down to the pool near our room and shortly thereafter a family of five Russian speakers would show up--one older couple, one younger couple, and what appeared to be a teenage daughter. Notable not only because they were perpetually smoking, but also because one day they shattered the idyllic calm by cranking up a CD player of loud, grating pop music while dancing in the pool. Have you ever been at a concert, or maybe in a movie, where people all of a sudden talk so loudly that you can't concentrate on anything else? Similar deal.
The Norwegers: A ruggedly attractive family of blondes who spoke a Nordic language of some sort. Not sure if they were actually from Norway, but close enough.
The Boys: Three young boys wearing matching blue rashies (swim shirts) and snorkel masks who spent every waking minute in the pool.
The Dudes: Muscle-bound gay couple with pierced nipples. (Which reminds me, I can't believe we forgot to send a postcard to The Boys! Next time.)
The Brits: There were two very nice older British couples we met one day at the beach when one of them asked if we had found her sunglasses. One of the women took a particular interest in Gretchen's pregnancy, to the extent that every time we saw her she would ask if we had picked a name yet because she simply had to know. That's the kind of thing that could be really obnoxious, but she was really quite sweet about it so no worries (and luckily we managed to duck the name thing each time she brought it up).
The Americans: I'll say this--we were stunned by how many Americans there were in general. Granted, it was an American hotel chain, but I don't think of Phuket as being a place many Americans go for holiday. Our guess was that a lot of them may have been expats living in Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo, etc. The presence of lots of Americans is often a major downer, but at least in this case the obnoxiousness quotient was fairly low.
(Meanwhile, someone somewhere is probably blogging about the pregnant lady who wouldn't get out of the pool and her strange husband who would go to extraordinary lengths to stay out of the sun.)
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