After Sunset (slash During Sunset) Fun in Phang-nga

As I have mentioned before, most of my nights consist of cooking and eating. If I'm teaching until 7, sometimes I'll go to the market in town for dinner where my very Dickensian meal consists of boiled rice, boiled chicken, cucumber slices, a strange (but weirdly OK-tasting) black "herbal" cube, and a small bowl of broth with a slice of squash at the bottom (so good, I have been trying to steal a glance at the chef/apron-ed man as he cooks but I can't figure out what's in it). The location of this gastronomic adventure is a wall-less shack with an aluminum roof under which picnic tables and brightly colored plastic chairs reside. Despite its rather bland description, the meal is actually delicious and the chicken/rice is flavored with a plethora of available sauces that range from the typically Thai, spicy chili sauce to a thicker brown sauce with what appears to be onions and peppers sliced and diced in it.

After eating, I usually head back to my house where this is a typical scene on my porch from about 9 pm until bed. [Aside/footnote: there is a rooster that lives next door who has taken it upon him/herself to begin crowing before sunrise (circa 4 am) but simply crowing is not enough for this rooster (who is not, I note, crowing at the break of day as Bob Dylan and others have claimed). He engages in a 4 am onward (as in through the afternoon) crowing dialogue/crow-off between a neighbouring, slightly further away rooster. The entire thing is mind-bogglingly annoying and now I have to lock my windows before I go to bed and thus deny myself the pleasure of falling asleep to the wind and the buzzing of insects.]

Candles propped up by various bottles/coral around the porch provide excellent reading light. The curly thing in the lower R-hand corner is the best anti-mosquito device of all time. It looks like one of those hippie incense things (and it sort of is) but the scent repels mosquitoes and flies and every other sort of small winged thing that makes incredibly annoying and distracting-while-reading noises.

One of the many candle-in-coral things around the porch.

When nights of reading and sitting on my porch don't suffice, sometimes I invite over two lads for a game of Risk and sitting on my porch...

Sometimes we're so enthused and energized by our (often 3 hour long) game of Risk that we decide to be adventurous and social and go to Stefan's Pizza Bar, which sometimes doesn't have pizza and isn't really a bar as much as it is a place filled with flashing lights, techno music, a fake Christmas tree decorated with small American flags, and a pool table.

When Stefan, a loud German who speaks five different languages (sometimes simultaneously) and is almost by necessity of his profession constantly intoxicated, has cheese and therefore can make pizza he begins the night by playing jazz or the Latin Grammy's podcast (no joke). After he has actually created and served the pizza, the music takes becomes slightly more aggressively tempoed (think hip Jazzercise music). Once we have finished eating and begun to play Connect Four (or pool) he puts on the flashing, dotted lights that are bright green and give the inside of the bar/restaurant/area the aura of being inside one of those nauseating spaceship Gravitron rides at amusement parks.

The more low key alternative to Stefan's is the Muslim fishing village which is a 20+ minute motorbike drive from Phang-nga. The road itself is beautiful (once you get off the absolutely terrifying highway of speeding trucks and cars and buses who drive like life is a MarioKart game).

The walkway to the fishing village is usually swathed in golden light when we drive up (the sunsets are half of the reason to eat dinner here) and there are the ubiquitous children playing in the afternoon sun.

To get to the fishing village itself one must walk over a long, narrow bridge whose wooden planks extend throughout the village and provide somewhat precarious walkways. When the ebbs and flows of the water are most noticeable and extreme, the bottom of the sea is revealed and with the mud comes a copious amount of what appears to be the claw of a crab but living on its own.

The restaurant of choice is located at the very end of the walkway and has recently expanded to the both sides of the walkway such that the new sitting area is directly over the muddy and expansive flat of the ocean floor. The scenery is spectacular. Especially as the sun begins its downward trajectory...

(this picture was not enhanced at all...the sun literally sent beams of light into the sky)

The meal itself almost equals the scenery is awesomeness. The menu is all in Thai  but I've figured out how to ask for exactly what I want which is bplaa tord (a whole fried fish, head and all, with garlic) and boo or gung (crab or shrimp, respectively) steamed. Everything is caught that day and sometimes you see fishermen bringing up tubs of live crabs and then ten minutes later bringing you a plate of them freshly steamed.