One Night in Bangkok

Okay, what I have to say first is that a 15 hour flight is a really, really, really long flight. We took a puddle-jumper to JFK airport, and then boarded a big Korean Air 747 and settled in to 6 cramped seats for a long, long time. They fed us two meals - delightful artistic constructions of somewhat mysterious food, served with a tube of hot pepper paste - and lots of drinks, showed two films and a couple of Korean soap operas which I found hard to follow even with subtitles, and we all slept in weird positions while the sun never set. We landed in Seoul and it was STILL day. There we discovered the transit lounge, and I started to feel like Tom Hanks in the Terminal as we moved in, slept on sofas, took showers, Halle got a tall chilled glass of milk, the boys played video games, and we spent a lovely layover. Korea is so organized. Well, I admit all we saw of it was the terminal, but you get an impression. It was so foggy outside I had no sense of our whereabouts at all. We ate supper at a place called Welly&, where among our dishes we ordered a ginseng soup bowl with chicken and it came with a small chicken IN IT, bones and all. If you want to experience a taste of our brief Korean stopover, check out Little Pusan in Maynard, I love their BiBimBop and so do the kids, so that was a familiar sight at Welly&.

Then back on the next plane for a 6-hour flight to Bangkok. We slept some more, watched another movie, ate another meal (breakfast? lunch? dinner? who's keeping track any more?), and landed at 11:30 pm Friday night local time. One of our checked bags didn't make it (Hey, one out of two ain't bad) - I could have sworn that the woman at the baggage counter said the words, "We've located it somewhere in China," but that could have been my jet-lagged interpretation of her accent, and it is supposed to arrive tonight via the same flight we took. Unfortunately, it was the one with Don's clothes in it, so he was limited to the single change of clothes he had packed in his carry-on, and he did buy a bathing suit so we could splash in the hotel pool today. Anyway, we were met at the airport by a very voluble driver from a tourist organization to drive us to the hotel, which had been arranged by our travel agent, and that was helpful. We left the airport and were slapped with a wall of humid heat. Halle threw out her arms and said, "Aah, Fresh warm air! It feels like warm water!" We are at the Royal River, a quiet and elegant hotel on the West Bank of the Chao Praya, very far from the traffic jams and the noise of the Center and the Old Quarter. I like the hotel, it suits our needs fine. The kids were delighted by the little geckos in the lobby which search the walls for mosquitoes. None in our rooms, thank goodness. Geckos, that is, or mosquitoes either for that matter. And our needs last night, anyway, were limited to darkness, sleep and quiet. We were in bed by 2 and dead to the world for many hours.

This morning I woke to find Jacob sitting on the balcony watching the water traffic flow by. We ate breakfast here - you can get anything from French toast to fried rice for breakfast - and took the hotel's free water shuttle down to River City... a mall, hmm. That water trip gave us an overview of the major sites and a gorgeous view of Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn. We walked from River City towards Chinatown, taking the smallest alleys we could find and seeing not a single other European or American for hours. We passed through tin & metal shop neighborhood, old car part neighborhood, and then motorcycle-part neighborhood, each of these distinctly set off from one another with stalls of bizarre spiky fruit and roasted goose hanging by their still-attached necks. Goose must be big here, we saw lots of this. Then we entered Chinatown, which was clock neighborhood, gold chain shop neighborhood, and finally tailoring neighborhood before our kids got tired of walking. We went to a temple of the golden Buddha - of which there are surely many - and at the entrance roving guys with digital cameras take your picture as you walk in ("Please, lovely lady! Hello, little boy!), and by the time you stroll out they have made them into buttons for your purchase at 200baht a piece. We didn't buy them. We had a nice conversation with some university girls practicing their English, and after the golden Buddha we hired a tuk-tuk (a manaical 3-wheeled vehicle with a seat for the driver, a bench for the passengers, and a chainsaw for an engine) and careened madly around the city to a site called the Jim Thompson House.

Now, that was a real treat. It is the estate of an American textile merchant who built a historic-feeling Thai home and exquisite gardens, then disappeared in Malaysia in the late 1960s, leaving the house to become a really wonderful museum. I loved the house, it was spare and teak and high-ceilinged, and felt a million years away from button-hawkers and gold-chain shops. We really enjoyed an interlude there and the gardens were gorgeous. We also found nearby the Thai Boy Scout council office with a Scout shop and bought some patches and a neckerchief, then took our wilting children to a food court in a mall, where Halle fell asleep on me while we were ordering. We patched together a meal from Italian, Indian and Thai menus. Then we hired a taxi which sat in a considerable amount of traffic back to the hotel. Swam in the hotel's lovely but completely impractical pool (no shallow end, too deep even for Don to stand, but it did have an unheated whirpool next to it so Halle could at least get wet). Naps, and now it's evening. I guess because we are so far south, it gets dark so early! We will hunt up some dinner and try calling the local English-branch bishop again. We have not got an answer yet so do not know what time church starts although we have the address for the building. I can't find a number for the missionaries either. Where are those clean-cut young men when you want them? We might not have Don's clothes by morning anyway, we will have to see. Love the internet connection right here in the lobby, a card gets you an hour for about $3.

Punakha Dzong, taken February 2002
Posted by Hello

Time Travel

What's up with the time? Well, I set the time to Bangkok time, which is also approximately Bhutanese time. It's half a day ahead. So when you view this blog, you can see what time it is for us.

T Minus 1 Day of Departure

We're getting ready to leave... the kids have rolling backpacks; I am packed in a Kelty backpack; Don has a rolling backpack and between us we have 2 large soft-sided duffels to check. Plus the oboe, which of course will be carried on somehow, and a laptop case. Just the last-minute items await - those will go in tonight, and we head out early in the morning for a flight to NY, then a second flight to Seoul, Korea.