I ventured out to the Sunday evening Walking Street (local name: Lard Yai) on Thanon Thalang for the first time in months tonight. In fact, I first circled the Old Town area snapping photos of the always lovely Kasikorn Bank building and historic On-On Hotel on Thanon Phang Nga and a few festive buildings along Thanon Yaoworat before turning into the very crowded ground lane of food booths and random musicians. It was nice to see so many people out-and-about: both locals and tourists.

The entrances to Lard Yai itself featured temperature scanners and wearing facemasks was a requirement to enter. I got a bit frustrated when I saw a number of foreigners walk past the scanners without holding their palms to the screens; these same tourists (you can tell!) also fished around in their pockets to put on a mask to walk by the security guards and then immediately removed them once amongst the crowds. I did not see similar behavior by any Thai people and those foreigners who knew how to walk through the stalls properly certainly were all wearing masks. As a result of the tourists flaunting the regulations, I didn’t linger and made it to the park entrance (my short-cut home) rather quickly. I do not want to catch the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID-19 by some idiot who feels that the local laws don’t apply to him or her.

At any rate, as I neared the northern edge of the Queen’s park, I could feel the first drops of rain on my arms. Luckily, they had installed tents in the Limelight parking lot in preparation for the New Year’s festivities so this provided shelter as the sky opened up in a downpour. I stood under one of these green tents for nearly an hour waiting for the torrent to dissipate; I finally gave up and walked hunched-over for the last five minutes or so of my journey home (there are NO awnings along this stretch so I arrived at my home completely drenched). While waiting under the tent, I had checked numerous weather sites for Phuket Town and all said that it was “partly cloudy” with less than one percent chance of rain!

I should know better to never venture out without at least an umbrella as one never knows when it might rain here (including the weather forecasters!). Still, I was happy to get out of the house in the evening for once. I will have to try that again next week during the New Year’s holiday. I actually have three days off from work (two of which are the weekend anyway) so I hope to make the most of that.