Dear Charles #13,

didn't think I would be posting another blog so soon eh? gotta keep up with me...you never know...im like a cat...or a...different animal that's unpredictable...

this weekend me and kyndra had to renew our visas so that we could legally still be living in thailand. lucky for us we live right up north so our drive is much shorter then someone coming from ..chiang mai or somewhere else more south. the border is a mere 45 min. drive, which we ventured together on just a few hours of sleep and no breakfast (although we did stop on the super highway to get some pineapple...frickin 20 baht for a bag. such a rip off...haha just kidding)
mae sei was our destination which is the last city in thailand before the border to burma. mae sei (for any of you who read kyle's note on facebook about his journey to mae sei and burma, this is the same place....just in case you couldn't tell by the identical names of the places..) i feel like is a 'last effort of selling things in thailand sort of city. you're driving along the super highway, looking out the window to rice patties and mountains, and then all of the sudden there are big gold signs and out of no where a million little shops..all pretty much selling you the same overpriced strings of beads, and fake jade bracelets. once you find a place to park, the process is way more simple then i feel like it should be...simple to the point of being sorta sketchy.
here is the process of getting into this other country (burma) and getting your passport renewed: you walk up to this building that looks like a giant house with a car port that you might find on proctor street in tacoma, and into a room whose door is a piece of fabric draped off of a string at the top of the door. this room is dimly lit, with two desks and three burmese officials and ghetto old computers from before computers were even invented....in the corner of the room there is another piece of fabric which i can only assume covers the bathroom, as right beside it right there in the office is a rusty leaky sink with a stained mirror and soap scum lining the faucet. you give your passport to one of these officials whose desk it littered with thai and burmese and american passports...and he trades you for a piece of paper that is your 'temporary' passport while you're in burma. basically if you loose this piece of paper, you are magically a citizen of no country and you are stuck in burma until...they become a free country.
once this process is done you walk across a little bridge like deal, and are welcomed into burma by crowds of song-tao drivers wanting to take you to all the tourists attractions in burma, then down a flight of cement, uneven stairs into the market where you are bombarded by every burmese merchant known in the country asking you if you want to buy cigarettes and viagra. doesn't matter that they are asking two single women.....they just need to make that sale, however scandalous or illegal.

me and kyndra had clear goals for our time in burma so we did our best to power through the crowd, and kindly but firmly let them know we didn't not want their pills or playing cards. we came there for dvds and bailey's...and we were gonna get it. our first stop was 'scorpion dvd' where we both scored a stupid amount of illegal movies and tv series for..dollars. i managed to get the entire series of 'friends' for $27, as well as 31 other dvds for a dollar a piece. all of them being blue ray and most of them either still in theatres in america or not out on dvd yet. the only not so good copy i got was of 'the curious case of benjamin button' but even then..its still watchable. we tried to move quickly as half way through our browsing a policeman came into the store and started to paroozed around. he never took off his sunglasses, which from the movies i've seen...is never a good thing. we hurried up, unsure if he was about to take that place down or bust a couple caps.
we made our way deeper into the market where we ended up being followed by a teenage girl trying to sell us playing cards. kyndra graciously bought some from her, which made her like us and decide to stick around. the next thing on our list was to get a new bottle of bailey's irish cream, but we didn't want to go into the liquor store with her watching so....we busted out the polariod camera and took a picture of all of us. she was fascinated (as was every other person in the market, which was evident by the crowds and crowds of people that swarmed us, grabbing for the girls picture to see it. it was very..charlie and the chocolate factory, when charlie finds the last golden ticket) which distracted her for enough time for us to grab the bailey's and meet her back down the road.
we decided to make our way out after talking with the girl for a little while (mostly kyndra because she spoke no english) but before we left she gave us a huge smile, pulled the picture from her tray and said that we were beautiful and held up the photo. i have a feeling she'll probably be hanging on to that for awhile.

we traveled back into thailand after that, picking up our passports in the sketchville office (luckily they were still there), and spent the rest of the afternoon at one of our favorite cafes in mae fa luang (about a half hour past our house) called 'parabola' where we talked for hours and looked through thai home-keeping magazines.

so it is now my mission to get all my movies back into america without getting caught. i've heard that for every dvd you bring back into the states, its around a $500 fine :/ let's hope i don't get caught, eh?