strange hat yai

chinese new yr hat yai
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ok hat yai, not quite sure how to describe it.

i arrived at about 10 at night, bus station is a bit outside the town but you can get a sangthew easily, i hit the 7/11 for some noodles and headed to bed, not realising it was the start of chinese new yr but little did i know that these celebrations go on for at least a week. took it easy the following day, getting stuck to the comfy bed, bit of pampering  and hit the several shopping centres in the area. found it hard to find any restaurants to eat. plenty of hawkers around if you like that sort of thing! so asked around where was good to go for that night for chinese new yr and i headed off to these school grounds not far from where i was staying. i must have been the only white person there, it was all chinese and they had kids and other people performing on stage, loadsa stalls, and there was this hawker stand that was selling bugs, lads i nearly got sick. they had massive cochroches and flys and other creepy things for you to eat, this guy came up with his kinds and ordered a few bags of what looked like flies and handed them to the kids and they ran off with the bags eating them like a bag of crisps! sickened i was! people kept coming up doing surveys on tourists, i filled in at least 2 of them! they had dragons and fireworks, which were all great. i didn't stay too long as it was getting late and i didn't want to walk the dark streets by myself. so more tv and bed. same thing the next day, tv, shopping, manicure/pedicure and just relaxing in the hotel. hat yai is probably the strangest and i could almost say i didn't feel 100% safe. streets are dark, the people are quite rude. for eg when i was in every other place in thailand the people were nice and friendly, in hat yai, they had no problem cutting in front of you in the queue for everything. and this happened a few times. so got anyway got a minibus to penang. it was quite funny as we were going through border control, the minibus driver giving the cop who was about to search the van and few quid on the sly!!  cop just pulled driver seat forward and walked off! traffic was really bad around butterworth, i thought i was going to be ill as it was a bit of a rickety van and he'd jam on the brakes and take off quick, i was soo happy to get to the island. anyway i'll save penang for the next chapter....i'm nearly a week behind n my writings so i'm already starting to forget stuff!! must try harder!!

it was quite funny as we were going through border control, the minibus driver giving the cop who was about to search the van and few quid on the sly!!