Cocoa Day/National Guard Birthday/Christmas Parade (California)/Republic Day (Malta)/Clip-On Tie Day/Santa Lucia Day/New Calendar Day
2003-12-13 @ 2:56 p.m.

This is my last day in Phuket! I'm quite happy to be going home actually, for vague reasons that I can't quite articulate. Call it holiday fatigue if you will. Can you believe it? They're chasing us out of the hotel room because they want to clean it up. Our checkout time was supposed to be 4 pm, but we're going off in a couple of minutes instead. I tried something new today, Black Forest ice-cream cake. I think it was vanilla, with blueberry sauce. Nothing earthshakingly spectacular, but it was a novelty. I've come to the stunning realisation that this was probably the holiday where I spent the most time in front of the television. Did you know that they have something on Chinese MTV that teaches people contemporary English phrases using music videos? It's quite entertaining, they even use Daria sometimes. The phrases are quite simple actually, stuff like "I couldn't live with myself" and "You can go either way". Now we all know how China's getting its populace to speak American-accented English...