We finally found a place to live! Ever since I got here I’ve been staying with Shawna and Kyle in their studio apartment. There was literally a six inch gap between our beds. Kyle has funny sleep habits. The first night there I woke up in the middle of the night to Shawna asking “Why are you waking up Lexi?!” and opened my eyes to find him leaning over her trying to poke my leg to make sure I was ok, completely sound asleep. It was a very cramped space to say the least, and I don’t know how to begin to thank them for letting me stay with them in their already tight space. We didn’t have a kitchen, just a hot pot that I had no idea what to do with, but Shawna somehow managed to whip up glorious meals out of. I kept asking her if she was keeping a little Thai lady locked away somewhere who was doing all the cooking. The bathroom was a very basic, traditional style bathroom, with no flush on the toilet, just a giant bucket of water next to in that you had to pour down to make it flush. There was no isolated shower space, just a drain in the corner of the bathroom floor. We were all going a little stir crazy, and I’m sure their situation was about ten times worse than mine. I was almost ready to call it quits and check into a hostel, just to make sure they could have some alone time when the owner of the place we’d had our eye on got back into town and offered to show us her place. That same day a three bedroom villa opened up so we arranged to go look at both.

The first place was way up a series of steep steep roads. There’s probably laws agains having roads that steep in the US. We just kept going up and up and up, around turn after turn after turn and I began to worry about getting my bike all the way back down. We finally reached a place to park the bikes because the final series of roads would be too steep to even drive them up. They were so steep that the sidewalk along the side was actually a staircase. Once we reached the top, then started the actual staircase leading up to the house. There had to be a few hundred of them at least. Part of me was delighted at how in shape I might be living in a place like this, while the other part of me was concerned about how much of a home body I might become out of terror to ever leave the place. We joked around that we’d have to set up hammocks at the bottom of the road for nights when we were too either exhausted or intoxicated to even dream of making it up the hill.

The place was beautiful for sure, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a little on the small side, but the patio had a pool and a view to kill for. Quite literally kill, because if you fell off that patio you’d be toast. But you could see both sides of the island in all their glory. It was the sort of view you would pay to climb up a hill like that to see.

We hiked our way back down to the bikes, I had to have Shawna drive mine down and ride on the back, not trusting my biking skills just yet to get me down alive. The second place we were looking at was just off the main road, about halfway between Sairee Beach and Mae Haad. There were still two pretty steep stretches of road leading up to it, but after the previous place they were a breeze. For the same price, or actually slightly less, the place was two stories, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a patio, and a jacuzzi. The view may not have been quite as mind blowing, but it was still kick ass. The architecture was awesome as they had built around the rocks originally there, and half the walls were made out of rock. It was exactly the place we were looking for so we jumped on it.

Last night after work we moved in. Moving on bikes turned out to be quite a challenge. Our friend Tyler volunteered to help us, and so the four of us kept riding back and forth between the two places with as much of our belongings as we could load onto our bikes. I made one trip with my backpack, the extra weight nearly causing me to lose my balance on multiple occasions, and then another trip with my carry-on suitcase wedged between my feet. At this point it was completely dark out and the roads were steep and unlit, quite a terrifying feat for someone who has only had a bike for a week. I am alive and unharmed though! Everything is coming together very nicely. I have work, a beautiful place to live, my own little bike, all that’s missing is my Fletch.