The Boring Beginning of the Thai Adventure

We arrived in Bangkok at 11:30 pm local time after flying 2 hours from Akron to Atlanta, 2 hour layover, 14 hours 55 minutes from Atlanta to Tokyo, 2 hour layover, 7 hours 59 minutes Tokyo to Bangkok.

First impressions:  it’s hot.  It feels like August.  You know that oppressive heat that we get here in Ohio where the air is heavy.  We’re directed to passport control before we can go collect our luggage.  We had to go through passport control in Japan as well.  All the signs are in the native language and in English.  Apparently the world knows that we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t teach its children to speak more than one language.

Passport control is a guy sitting in a booth, checking your passport, asking you how long you want to stay.  In Japan it was easy because we had a connecting flight.  In Bangkok, I had to fill out an entry form and a departure form and show the guy in the booth and let him take my picture.

Then the luggage.  Nancy’s frequent flyer points gave our luggage this nice priority status, which means it comes off the plane first.  Pretty awesome.

We were directed through a partition area and into the open airport beyond.  Apparently the partition was customs.  They randomly pick people to search.  Apparently, two tired 40 year old+ women are not threatening.

The airport was a confusion of people, ATMs, money changers, translators, people with signs.  We didn’t see our sign, so we decided first thing was first and got some Thai money, baht from an ATM.  The ATM exchange rates are better than the money changers and I had read that the money changers in the hotels were even worse.

Afterwards, we found our guide.  She was a tiny girl in her twenties, Miki.  She called our driver and we all got loaded into the car.  Miki told us that the drive to our hotel was about an hour, depending on traffic.  It was about midnight and she said traffic was slightly better at this time.

She told us that there are two things on every corner in Bangkok:  ATMs and 7-11s.  We got to the hotel and were immediately offered a drink.  This kind of seems to be a thing in Bangkok, the offering of a beverage.  The tap water is not safe to drink so every hotel gives you two bottles of water.  This becomes important later because I started hoarding water, you don’t realize how much you use when it’s easy to obtain—brushing teeth, drinking, taking meds (I had my malaria meds to focus on there were to be mosquitos).  Plus it was 85 degrees and it was 1 am, the coolest time of day in Bangkok.  Anyway, after the flight from hell and 24 some hours of travel, I was dehydrated and needed something to drink.  It was warm.  It might have been mineral water or something, it wasn’t quite water. 

Our room was nice, it overlooked a street in the heart of Bangkok.  It was a short walk to the sky train and a huge shopping mall.  Hard beds, but clean and modern.  We were exhausted, so we changed and got ready for bed.

That’s when I discovered the step down into the bathroom.

I nearly broke an ankle.  I warned Nancy.  After all, she’s the acknowledged klutz.

 

Second issue.  The bathroom has a glass wall that looks out over the room.

There’s Nancy sitting on the bed waving at me.

The shower is all glass too.

Seriously?  Who wants to see that.

Nancy discovered the shade…thank goodness.

Have to use my bottle of water to brush my teeth.  Which sucks, because I’ve just had the airplane trip from hell and I’m thirsty.

As we head to bed, I offer to keep the light on in the bathroom so we have some light in the hotel room and don’t run into anything…sadly, I have forgotten about the shade.  The light in the bathroom lights up the room like a batman beacon.

Nancy:  “Uhm….”

Me walking back into the room:  “Oh.  That’s not going to work.”

Nancy: “No, probably not.”

Anyway, we crash.

We manage to sleep until 4 am—which is 4 pm at home.  Nancy goes up to check out the pool while I struggle to wake up.  She’s a morning person.  Ugh, morning people.

Anyway, Day 1 in Bangkok is a free day—to make sure our jet lag isn’t too bad.

Breakfast at the hotel is free.

It’s a buffet.  We have choices both Asian and Western:  omelets, rice, cheese sausage and chicken sausage which is just strangely colored things in tube form (no I didn’t try them), bacon, fruits, cereal—corn flakes and cocoa flakes—and swiss muesli, fruits.  The fruits are mostly watermelon, papaya, mango, and pineapple.  Fresh squeezed orange juice, apple juice, water.  Yogurt.  Tiny pancakes and French toast made with regular slices of bread with the crusts cut off so they really looked like thick, triangular crepes.

After breakfast we went to the shopping center.  There was a big “CITIBANK” sign on the side of the building, so Nancy was going to change money and I was going to get some money from the ATM.

Of course my debit card didn’t work in the ATM at Citibank.  Just one more reason to hate Citibank.  As we walked around the small auxiliary shopping center, I found another ATM which took my card just fine.  We bought bottles of water and then headed back to the room.

A late morning, early afternoon in the pool, prepared us for our trip to the restaurant we wanted to go to.  Cabbages and Condoms, which our guide had given us directions to and recommended.

Onward through the streets of Bangkok in the next blog post.