Our last night in Pattaya

  Well, we are back in England, safe and sound. Praise God! So... we thought we'd write about our crazy last night in Pattaya. It seems like months ago already!

    Tuesday, February 22^nd, we began the morning slowly getting packed (leaving Pattaya Wednesday morning), when we had an unexpected visit from the landlady. She said how she was going out of town the following day and wanted the next month’s rent that day. We hadn’t yet discussed Jade and Nathanael’s plans for after we left. Jade was sick with bronchitis and their family was at the hospital most of the afternoon, so we asked her to come back later.

  That evening we had the Thai team over and all ate pizza together. It was a sweet time of fellowship and we felt so blessed to have grown so close with them all, even through language barriers. Jade and Nathanael returned an hour or so after everyone else, and we finally got to chat to them about their plans. They felt right to negotiate a price to stay in the house until March 8^th, when they fly out, instead of paying for an entire month and had Ying's mom call to do so. The landlady said she would be over to talk about it.

                                          

  Ying could tell right away by her body language that she was up to something. Ying was right. She didn't just want next month’s rent (10,000 baht ($333))...  she wanted 15,000 baht just to finish the month and 5,000 baht for just one more night if we decided to move out the next day. Ying, seeing she was trying to take advantage of us, said we shouldn't stay another night. “Alright, we're moving out tonight...”

We began frantically cleaning and organizing. The house was very empty when we had moved in, so after a month we had collected quite a few "things" (bedding, towels, kitchen utensils, food, cleaning supplies, etc) and at that point had very little time to "uncollect" them. Everything we purchased was to be donated to the team when we left, but some things would still be needed by Jade and Nathanael. What they could live without went home with Zhongy, Bey and Lek, and Ying and her mom. Everything else got loaded onto a song taew (pickup truck) and dropped off at the newly remodeled “Welcome Center” for further sorting. We booked rooms back at 'Eves Place', which is where we spent our first week in Pattaya, and brought our bags there. It was about 11pm when we said our final goodbyes to our Thai friends.

 It was sad that our last night was spent that way, but we were thankful not to leave Jade and Nathanael to deal with that on their own.

The next morning we said our goodbyes to the Muller's (with surprise visits from Zhongy, and then Bey and Lek at the bus station) and caught a bus to Bangkok, which is where our flight departed from.


We miss our dear friends in Thailand.  We continue to pray for them and will hopefully be with them again!