What I Did Last Summer

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Okay class, settle down. Would anyone like to tell us about what they did over the summer holidays?

ME ME! PLEASE MISS, ME!

Eventually, after much frantic last minute organizing and a final weekend enjoying the company of Alex and Boab chilling by the campfire and behaving like the manliest of men, following their impromptu road trip to the south coast, my good wife and I boarded an aeroplane bound for Bangkok, Thailand. My video screen didn’t work, the reading lights had malfunctioned, and the old nut of a woman beside me claimed that feet smelled, then informing me of a concoction which would help combat my problem. Although she had a very valid point, I still found it in me to muster what has remarkably become probably my last recorded simmering rage. Fortunately I slept, and disembarked with only a minor urge to pen letter of complaint a to BA.

The guide book warned that Bangkok smells like an oven filled with vomit, and it does to an extent, but mostly not as bad as i feared. I have begun to mentally break the smell down into its most basic component parts. So far I have identified ‘Thai Coffee’ and ‘Drains’.

We ended up spending 4 nights in Bangkok, enough to begin with. We got lost enough to find the river, the palace, and Wat Pho complete with a 46 meter golden Buddha, and visited the weekend market selling knives, vests, cats, dogs, squirrels, and a hundred shades of fakery. We ate from roadside vendors, sweated a lot, and perpetually rejected the advances of Tuk Tuk drivers and their offers of rides to non-existent wonders in the city (although one such gent did approach me, made it clear he wasn’t trying to win my custom, and asked where I was from to have skin as pale as I possess)

Time for a list:

Top 5 Animals so far:

1. Elephant (Baby one being taken for a stroll along Th Koh San, Bangkok)
2. Lizard
3. Fish with Giraffe-esqe markings spied while snorkelling
4. The hot sleepy dog snoozing on the bar
5. Toadkill (The numerous identical flattened leathery husks of toads paving the busy road linking our current location with the port town on the Island)

Bangkok seems far away, much of the detail has been lost through heat, Chang and oversleeping, but everyone has been there anyway, they’ll fill you in on the sex tourists and the likes..

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