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How much food can four little people eat?
The Little One, Jennifer House, My Own Good Self, and the One from Plymouth Jenny and Laura arrived on Sunday, the day after we got back from Laos. I left Fiona pottering around the huge weekend market, buying t-shirts and chopsticks, while I hung out at the airport. Again. I know that place so well now. They came through really quickly, no problems at immigration, apart from Laura having a row with a Korean couple who tried to push in front of her in the queue. Needless to say, they failed miserably. And she didn’t get lost, or leave the airport, or anything, as she was under strict instructions to stay put in case I couldn’t find her. We met Fiona back at the flat, and went straight to the Raintree Spa about five minute walk away, and had massages and facials for a few hours. It’s a very hard life we have. Then we went to the Red Pepper for an enormous meal and a couple of cocktails. The girls are loving Thai food, even Jen, who admits herself she’s a wee bit picky and is a strict veggie. Pad Thai, the noodle dish, is becoming a staple of our diet, along with various green curries, pomelo and papaya salads, and tofu covered with
garlic and chilli. We had an early enough night, after a hard day of travelling and shopping.
Laura and I, dedicated as we are to the temples we call our bodies, got up at 8 for a swim. The other two chose sleep. We pootled off to the Grand Palace to start off with, after an initial false start with a taxi that didn’t know where it was. This is something everyone has to see in Bangkok. Acres of incredible buildings covered with mirrored mosaics, lush, well-tended gardens with super-manicured trees (some look like lollipops); I forget how amazing and impressive it is, it’s dreadful how nonchalant I can become after having been here so many times. It’s great to see this place through other people’s eyes and appreciate it all over again. The girls’ clothing was deemed slightly inappropriate, so they had to borrow long sarongs and big man shirts from the ‘dressing room’ to maintain a semblance of decency. Ankles, ladies, watch the ankles. We saw the Emerald Buddha, though he’s actually made of jade, in his summer outfit. He has three little outfits for different seasons: summer, winter (shawl to keep him warm), and rainy (mac and
Grand Palace
Kind of impressive? welly boots…if only. Actually a foxy off-the-shoulder number). We knelt in the temple for ages, it was so peaceful, and the quietest I’ve ever seen it.
We headed out and up to Khao San Road, the main backpacker street that had its heyday in the 70’s, when it was full of long-haired hippies. No change there then. Quick lunch of yet more Pad Thai and pineapple rice, a mosey up and down to buy some little essentials, like bikinis, shorts, trousers, skirts and tops, and we decided to get a water taxi (though more like a water-bus, and always in a terrible hurry) down the river to the stop where it meets the Skytrain, which handily goes straight to the flat. We got chatting to a bloke who owns a school in the area, and ended up in two tuk-tuks to be taken to the Lucky Buddha and the Big Buddha, with the non-negotiable stops along the way at a jewellers and a silk shop to pretend to be interested so the drivers get petrol vouchers from the owners for bringing these wonderful Westerners. At one temple, a bloke was selling sparrows in mini bamboo cages that you release as
a type of offering. What a great way to earn money, buy a few sparrows, train them to come back in a homing pigeon sort of way, and then live forever by flogging the same six sparrows to people over and over again. Enterprising. We did end up at a water taxi stop eventually, not having lost anyone even for a minute, which was quite good and somewhat surprising. And for only 5 baht each (70p) for an hour driving around town, we were happy enough, we had no pressing engagements. We got on the right boat, going the right way, after walking down a pier full of buckets of turtles, frogs, eels, and various other waterlife whose future lay in being someone’s dinner that evening. As we waited for the boat, we watched people feeding the carp by the pier, a writhing mass of fish that made the river look like it was boiling - quiet scary. The pier itself was also making the most awful noise, like metal screaming as it is being operated on with no anaesthetic, as it bobbed up and down on the waves. It was just the rollers, but between that and the thrashing
fish, it wasn’t a very peaceful place. The journey downriver was fun, but the driver was in such a hurry, we felt quite James Bond-esque crashing through the brown waves. Though the image was marred slightly as we were surrounded by non-fazed Thais checking their BlackBerries.
We reached the stop that coincides with the Skytrain, got manhandled off the boat as we weren’t leaping off it quick enough, and got on the very slick overhead metro that speeds through the skies of Bangkok, almost directly to the flat. We were feeling very sticky and hot, so legged it down to the pool for an impromptu session of “Laura’s aqua-gym”, which pleased the men in the bistro that overlooks the pool. We chomped all the leftovers from the Red Pepper last night, as well as a bucket of pomelo (a sort of ginormous grapefruit hybrid that isn’t as tart), and drank an awful lot of wine as Fiona and I taught the other two all the great card games we learned in China. Laura attempted to go to bed a few times, every attempt thwarted by Jennifer and myself, until we finally relented and let her sleep. Jen and I
were up until the early hours putting the world to rights. If only we could remember how.
Up pretty late, probably something to do with the late night (nothing to do with the wine). We attempted to swim, but ended up just floating mostly. Fiona headed back to Shanghai while we had yet more Pad Thai at a roadside stall. I then took the other two to Pantip Plaza, the enormous electronic mall, for some vital DVD purchases. Jen bought bundles of knocked-off action films for her fella, Robin, which is not ethical behaviour for a veggie-eco-warrior type, I think, though she did fret about what type of illegal behaviours she maight be supporting with her purchases. Laura and I, on the other hand, have no such principles, and faced no moral dilemma in the slightest. We mooched around a clothes mall, spending most of the time in the food hall, drinking mango smoothies and shovelling mango and sticky rice as fast as we could into our bellies. We headed down to the Raintree Spa for yet more treatments, Laura and I had an oil massage and a pedicure. They put us in a double room, I think they
thought we were a couple, we ever so gently closed the movable partition as they left us to put on the thermal knickers provided, and turned off the air conditioning they had blasting. It was a great massage, slightly marred by the attention, once again, paid to my boobs, it is just not necessary for a masseuse to oil up every part of your body, there are no muscles there that need focussing on to such an extent. Jen had a Swedish massage as Laura and I got our feet done, the reaction when they saw how much hard skin was on the soles of our feet was slightly funny, we explained it away by saying that, in England, everyone walks around barefoot. When Jennifer reappeared, she looked so traumatised. She’s awfully sensitive, and apparently the massage was really hurting, it had to be stopped so often. There were actually little bruises on her legs the next day, the poor chicken. We went across the street for food, eating really hot garlic and chilli chicken, as a band played in the background. We had a ridiculously early night, as it was a 5am wake-up for our 7am flight to the
islands.
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