My Adventures in Thailand

This post is by Kira Lipson, age 9, 3rd grade, Wade Thomas School

I've been gone for about a week now, and so many amazing things have happened already. After about 37 hours of traveling (to be exact) we finally arrived at our hotel. Once I got into the room, I plopped down onto the bed since I was so tired. I barely got any sleep the days before because we were on airplanes almost all 24 hours of the day except when we were waiting for the planes to change. After we had unpacked our bags, my dad took us out to the market. It was so different from the stores we have in America. On the way, we passed a snake and monkey show, and saw a 7 month old monkey being trained. We went a little closer and we talked to the trainer, who let us pet and hold the monkey. After about half an hour of playing with it, we walked down the street to the market. There we saw lots of interesting things: dragon fruit, coconut cakes (which my brother loves), and raw meat hanging on strings. We also saw raw fish, and when you buy it the person who is selling it cooks it for you. What I liked best about being in the market was watching someone cut the pineapple so the stem turned into a stick and it was like a popsicle. My brother calls them pineappsicles. We we got back home, we ate what we bought and took a nice long swim in the pool.

The next day mostly all we did was do math work and swim in the pool. My mom was up in our room while me, my brother, and my dad were in the pool. My dad brought down a beach ball and we started playing with it. My dad called it PE. Instead of an "E", I put a "V" for "pool volleyball". Then my brother added an "E" at the end for "education". When my mom came down, we said that we did some more school and she asked what we did. Then I said "PVE". She asked what that was and we explained the whole thing.

I was really excited because we were going snorkeling the next day. That day came and we had to hurry because we were getting picked up around 8:30 or 9 a.m. When we went to the next hotel to pick up more people to go on the tour, we met a family that was going snorkeling too. We all got on a boat that took us to four different islands. We stopped at the first island and swam offshore into the water. I was getting water in my snorkel so I had to wait behind while my mom and my brother swam ahead. Once I was ready, I swam out and saw all different kinds of fish. I also saw some sharp black sea urchins. Some of the fish were tiny and bright blue. Others were big and blue, green and purple, but they looked rainbow. The first island was my favorite. After an hour had passed, we got back on the boat to go to the second island. The boat stopped in the middle of the water and we jumped out with life vests. There weren't that many fish and the water wasn't that clear, so I went up to get some lunch on the boat. When I finished lunch, it was time to go to the third island. The third island had very shallow water and me, my brother and my dad snorkeled through it. I thought the water would get deeper, but it didn't. That island wasn't so fun. The fourth island we didn't snorkel. We gave our masks back and went onto the beach. We swam awhile with the other kids and then my parents took us to a cave where we explored through tunnels and that was lots of fun. When the time was up, we got back on the boat and it brought us to where we started. We said bye to our new friends and a bus dropped us off at our hotel. That was a fun day.

These are some of the adventures that I have had so far.