in the water, out of the water, in the water, out of the water

so we're finally home from our weekend excursion and I have a midterm tomorrow. I think as a group we studied for a total of 1 hour. Oops. So after my last post, Gina and I decided to go exploring aka find what kind of delicious snacks we can stuff ourselves with-great success. We got bubble tea and some chips (roast basil chicken doritos and malasian spice lays) and watched chinese movies in the hotel room. Obviously we fell asleep at some point, because our 6am wakeup call came WAY too early the next morning. One look outside made it clear that rafting was not going to be pleasant at all, the steady cold rain was none too promising. It was a couple hour bus ride to the rafting site where we were greeted with MORE rain, stinky wet suits, and helmets that looked more like swim caps than something that could actually protect my skull. When we finally got in the water, the rain had stopped which gave me some hope that the rafting trip would be fun buuuuuut not so much. First of all, their definition of white water rafting is quite different than ours: there were probably 5 rapids max the entire trip and the water was pretty static. Needless to say we had to paddle a LOT. After trying to stay in a straight line for about an hour, we gave into nature and just spun around in circles until the "guide" (I use this term loosely because all he did was chain smoke, talk on his cell phone, and run into us with his motorized boat) towed us for a little while. Overall rafting was not awesome, but we didn't call ourselves the party raft for nothing-let's just say the vegetation in the water didn't stay in the water..We showered and ate and passed out on the bus until we got to our next destination: random native shopping village. Shopping was pretty much crap until we started an impromptu rice wine tasting party. Interesting. We did a lot of other touristy things like visiting the tropic of cancer and a fish hatchery.

Bought some gifts. Not too exciting. We ate dinner at the fish place and our dinner consisted mostly of clams, the hatchery's main product which was pretty good, but we were all tired, cranky, and not looking forward to the 3 hour train ride back.

We attempted to to study on the train but obviously we ended up just talking the entire time. The internet isn't working, I'm getting annoyed, and there's nothing interesting to talk about today so I'm going to cut this post short. I guess I should try to study a little bit too...