A New School For Koh Chang?
Thailand has one of the great world cuisines. Thai food is healthy, nutritious and delicious. It is also low in fat, for those of you who care. Many visitors to Koh Chang spend a filling and fulfilling day learning some of the basics of Thai cuisine at one of the growing number – four at the last count – of Thai cooking schools on the island. Try it, you’ll have a good time and learn something.
Thais are also, unsurprisingly, the world experts at speaking and writing the Thai language. Really. So whilst on Koh Chang why not start out on the fascinating road to mastering this intricate and daunting language at Anchana language school on White Sands Beach. Thai people love it when visitors try to speak to them in Thai, and things generally becomes cheaper when you order them in Thai if you need a financial incentive for your linguistic up-skilling.
Or there is, of course, Massage. Thailand is rightly hailed as one of the global homes of massage and a whole industry has grown around visitors having their twinges, aches and pains rubbed away while they are in Thailand. Here on the island you can get a massage at one of the scores of Spas and massage parlours or even as you lie on the beach. But in a, “Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for ever” style you can also learn the secrets of massage whilst you are here. At Bodiwork Spa Academy in Chai Chet you can receive training in a perplexing variety of different types and styles of massage. Or better still send someone close to you and then you can benefit from their new skills.
So that’s it, Thai people are clever at lots of things and are more than happy to show you how to do them during your Koh Chang holiday. But that’s not quite all is it? Think about it. Do you really imagine that a race as wise and inscrutable as the Thais would just give away all their secrets? Of course not. There’s one thing that the Thai people are better at than pretty well everyone else in the world. And you don’t see any schools teaching it on Koh Chang or anywhere else for that matter. Do you want to know what it is?
Sleeping.
Think about it. Remember that time you got the bus from Bangkok to Koh Chang and you stared out the window in sleepless frustration for five hours as the Thai guy sitting next to you dozed contentedly on your shoulder? Remember all those little empty Thai shops that you went into only to have a prone figure emerge from behind the counter to cheerfully serve you. Thai people have the enviable talent of being able to sleep whenever they are tired, wherever they are. In the west we are programmed from childhood to go to sleep for a set time in a set place at a set hour, leaving us terribly prepared for any number of situations where this is impossible.
So here is my plea. Could some enterprising businessperson please establish the Koh Chang Academy Of Sleep and teach us frustrated yawning visitors how it’s done? I’ll be the first to sign up, as long as classes don’t start too early in the morning. I like a lie-in.
