Occasionally there are days that contain the perfect mix of completely insane, mildly frightening, stunningly beautiful, with a side order of new foods and a sprinkling of new experiences. Saturday was one such day.

900 baht rents you a Honda Jazz with plenty of room for six, if you stick one kid in the trunk area, that is. (No hate mail please, this is so much safer than riding in the back of a pick-up truck, on a chicken bus, crammed six to a three wheeled tuk-tuk, or on bicycles on the motorway outside of Nottingham. All of which we’ve survived.) As usual, the competition was hot for the privilege of wedging into the trunk with leg room, arguably the best seat in the tiny car. 

Left hand drive is taking me a bit to get used to. It’s not the first time we’ve seen it, it’s just that old habits die hard and I forget. I regularly open the driver’s side door to get in, only to see Tony sitting there with a, “Yes, may I help you? Other side, Darling,” look on his face. I am almost over gasping when Tony turns the “wrong way” down the absolutely correct side of the road. “Hey, good job Mom! You’re not clutching your seat now!” Was Ezra’s kind encouragement by mid-afternoon. Indeed. We all laughed every time the windshield wipers swiped instead of the turn signal coming on and there was plenty of back seat driving. Tony loves that. Especially from the crowd that doesn’t drive yet.

I have found my new favourite place to shop. In the world.

It’s also, hands down, the craziest place I’ve ever shopped. Maybe I don’t get out enough, I don’t know, but “Super Cheap” on the outskirts of Phuket town is exactly my kind of commercial riot and a full afternoon’s entertainment. You’d better bring your Eperb because you might get lost and need the coastguard to fly you out!

How to describe it? “Kind of like Thai Sam’s Club, Mom… only not exactly.” Part good old fashioned market place, part department store, part really jive mall, part every single store you can think of, part circus, part farm, part absolute madhouse. Scheherazade herself could not have dreamt up a more fanciful tale to save her life than unfolded inside the ramshackle stick-and-tin-roof-meets-warehouse that is this shopping venue.

A sampling of the contents:

• Housewares… absolutely everything you can imagine, I dare you to come up with something they didn’t have
• Veggie & Fruit market with all of the attending mess, smell, and shouting
• Fish, live, dead, dried, fresh, as you like it
• Eels, “Raw and wriggling…” in Hannah’s best Golum voice
• Huge snails, I mean HUGE (see the above picture)
• Giant squid wings
• Live birds of all sorts, chickens to song birds
• Pets, including baby squirrels
• Noodles (aisles and aisles)
• A cement mixer
• Motorbikes
• Light up signs for bathrooms that included LED urine streams that moved… on the men’s sign, clearly. This was a hit with the boys.
• Baskets
• Appliances (I found a toaster oven!)
• Eggs: tiny spotted ones, like quail; also chicken, duck, goose, the hot pink ones that we’re not brave enough to try yet, the cured ones, and even blue ones that reminded us of our friends the Woods’ blue eggs!
• Powdered chicken. Yep.
• Imported cigars
• Auto parts (all of them, I think)
• Farming stuff, you name it
• Clothing
• A bakery
• Tea, tea and more tea I couldn’t read any of the labels, but I bought some, it’s not half bad
• Shrines
• Little buddhas & big buddhas
• Incense and candles
• Fireworks, in BIG bundles. The boys begged. We said no.
• Poisons for every tropical critter imaginable (I banned breathing in that section)
• Plastics. I can’t decide if the creators of plastic should be reserved a seat of honor in heaven or a special layer of hell where they live among the discarded results of their genius. Everywhere there’s plastic. 

If you’ve been here, you’re laughing now. If not, well, you’re just going to have to book flights to Phuket and see for yourself.

I think the only things they didn’t sell were magic carpets, but I can’t be sure as we didn’t even come close to seeing the whole thing.

When the rain started pouring the sound was deafening under the corrugate roof. The lights flickered and went out:

Hundreds of people, in the dark, every smell known to man and beast. Gabe and I just looked at each other and laughed. We were the only ones who even noticed, it seemed.

Lunch found us in the “food court” for lack of better term, but don’t take that to mean any food court you’ve encountered in the first world. Dim sum, spring rolls and tons of stuff we’d never tasted for three bucks a person, including drink. We feasted.

Gabe and I downed three big spoonfuls of the red “soup” that was served with our spring rolls before we got the memo that it was a condiment for drizzling on our lunch. By then it was too late, our mouths were on fire, for an hour. 

The rest of the day was spent in happy circumnavigation of our island. The take home message: we’re exactly where we want to be: WAY at the north end away from the craziness. But, we did love the gorgeous overlooks, the mad-house strips that were Karon and Patong and the elephants.

Did I mention the elephants?

We passed several elephant camps and nearly drove off the road in excitement. Okay, we did kind of drive off the road. We turned around and went back to take pictures, like the tourists we are, and to stare with big eyes and these enormous creatures. Ezra is almost explosive in his desire to ride one. Perhaps for his birthday in a month. We can’t do it all the first week. Elephants are a little scarier when they’re not behind a zoo wall… bigger too!

As if that was not enough for one day we had to go to our local market when we finally made it home. We were hot and tired but Gabe cheerfully offered to be my porter and carry the pounds and pounds that it takes to feed our herd for three days and side step the puddles of stinky muck and blood from the fish butchers in the market. He’s always great about that, no matter where we are. Here he’s especially keen though, he’s discovered “fish-kabobs” and cannot get enough of them. He knows I’ll buy him a big, fat, crispy one in return for his efforts and so no watermelon is too big to lug happily.

We’ve been on the ground two and a half weeks. We’ve found “home” and we’re beginning to feel settled.