Day 5 - A quiet day and a dinner cruise

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Ok, so yesterday was full and intense. And we have had a lot of days in a row that have been full on, so today we decided to just chill out. We woke early, were still tired and decided to go back to bloody bed. Soooo worth it. Got back up at 9:30 and threw clothes on to get down to breakfast before it finished. We are all loving the breakky buffet, a huge selection and great mix of Asian and Western foods.

After breakky I decided I wanted to get onto the blog writing for the temple day, and Todd wanted to try out the gym, plus we had some laundry to get done, so we got all agreed we were not in a hurry to go anywhere. I stayed in the room and got typing and Todd went downstairs to the laundry level. Now I only got second hand accounts of this, but apparently putting on a load of laundry was not as easy as one might think. The machine takes tokens, so first Toddy had to head down to reception to buy these, he took some time to explain to the guys there that we wanted 4 tokens because we had 2 loads we needed to wash and dry. Once this hurdle was passed and he got the tokens, he went back to the laundry to get it started. He put 2 machines on and 1 of them worked fine, but the second one just seemed to be spinning dry clothes around, no water had gone into the machine. We had to call the maintenance guy again (this guy must truly think we are a pain in the arse!), and then he couldn't understand why he had been called. 'Machine working!' he said. Todd tried to explain that yes, the machine was spinning, but there was no water in it. The guy didn't understand. Todd pointed to the first machine and said 'See! Bubbles', then pointed to the other machine and said 'No bubbles'. The language barrier was too great. Bubbles was not a word he understood lol. Not sure whether Todd eventually managed to successfully explain that there was no water in the machine, or if the guy just gave up and gave us what he thought we wanted, but we were refunded the token and used it to put the load in another machine.

So while this is going on, Kalyb decides to try the butt sprayer. Todd has become quite a fan and has insisted we all must try it, so Kalyb gave it a go........he is not a fan lol. Apparently a cold jet of water up his bum was not his cup of tea, and we are cracking up laughing about this when Todd comes back from the fight against laundry. At this point he is a touch frustrated and ready for a beer, but he decided to go sweat out the frustration at the gym instead. The boys went down with him and they all got a good sweat on and then went for a swim in the pool......unbeknownst to be at the time, apparently part of this swim included Kalyb throwing shit from our balcony into the pool from 10 stories above it at Todd's urging! Bad, bad boys!!!

So after their swim they came back upstairs and I was still madly blogging away, still only about halfway through all that had happened on the crazy temple day, but everyone was hungry so we thought we'd go next door to the Charlie Brown cafe. Yes, this is a cafe named after a Peanuts character! To be honest though, besides the pic of Charlie Brown on the sign it isn't particularly Peanuts themed, and it is definitely some authentic Thai food on the menu, though they did have some western choices which suited us for Corey. Todd got a mince and basil stir-fry thing, Kalyb got garlic pork, Corey got a chicken schnitzel and I ordered a green chicken curry and rice. None of these things advertised themselves as spicy, or even had 'chilli' in the description, but omg was my curry HOT! Todd's mince was also really spicy. I am feeling more and more like a big wuss over here, I like some spice in my food, but these mob are not fucking around! And again, on the table was a heap more chilli stuff that you can put on your dish, just in case it wasn't already spicy enough! My curry about blew my head off, but damn was it tasty and I struggled through that bad boy! Todd's food was also really good and he embraced the spice and gobbled it all down. At this point I was sweating and crying and gulping down my cold beer to try and put out the fire. The waitress came out to see how we are going and I said can I please have another beer? This is SPICY! And she took one look at my sweaty, teary face and cracked up laughing. I laughed too, I said it's soooo good, but HOT! She shook her head at me, I am pretty sure she didn't think it was hot lol. Anyway, she brought me another beer and we sat and relaxed and watched as the street food vendors started setting up their stalls all along the road in front of us. We were having a pretty late lunch, it was about 3pm at that point and Todd and I were due to go on a dinner cruise and be picked up at 5pm. We were stuffed full and so decided to see if we could change our dinner cruise to the later 7pm pick up. Rang the number and though we had a few communication difficulties (I am finding talking over the phone a lot harder than communicating in person!), it was a pretty easy thing to change to the later cruise.

The cafe had a couple of cages with birds in them, some budgies and a pair of lovebirds, and while Corey was inspecting them he noticed some snails behind the cages, rather than hanging in the garden on the plants the snails were clinging to the fake grass that was strangely attached to the garden wall. I wondered why the snails would be on the plastic grass instead of the plants, and Corey thought they were dead, so I told him to pick one up. The snail moved when he grabbed it which startled him and he dropped it! The shell cracked pretty hard on the pavement and I felt sorry for him so I picked it up and put it on my leftover lettuce leaf from lunch (careful to not give him a bit with curry sauce on it, I imagine that stuff that burns my mouth would be death to a snail!). So then Corey wanted to give the other snails lettuce so he picked them off the plastic grass wall and gave them their own lettuce leaves. Weirdly, they immediately left the lettuce and made their way back up to the fake grass wall! Go figure. Us desert people don't see snails very often, so we were fascinated by their little googly eyes on the end of the stalks, and if you watched closely you could see him breath by the moisture rippling up and down his body. Was cool!

After our little David Attenborough experience with the snails we went back to check on our laundry and get ready to head off on our cruise. Todd had another fun experience with the laundry guy because our clothes weren't quite dry yet and he needed to negotiate for more tokens to put the dryers on again. He looked slightly frazzled when he returned lol.

During this time Corey decided to brave the butt sprayer, and we have another convert! In fact, he loves it. So we have 2 lovers of the spray, 1 hater, and myself, who has thus far abstained. I guess I better give it a go at some point 😊

So our plan for the evening was for the kids to stay at home in the room and have some Subway for dinner while Todd and I went on the dinner cruise on the Chao Phraya river. I was going to bring them along, but after checking the menu I worried that there was nothing that Corey would eat on it, and Kalyb was happy to stay with him and chill out, so we decided to just have some Kristal and Toddy time, which was nice! The driver came to pick us up and we jumped into his minivan. On the drive to the river we saw lots of little night markets and streetfood stalls that we are keen to check out another time. We picked up another couple from a hotel further down the road and then arrived at the boat pier. We were really early, and the boat wasn't going to be there for another 40 minutes or so, but we spotted a guy with a couple of fridges so we approached him in the hopes that he might have cold beer in there......and of course he did!! Woohoo! We got chatting to him and he was a really lovely guy. He thought Todd was a bikie because of his rings and tattoos, and as per usual, we tend to attract strange people to us and they feel comfortable telling us their life story, so we find ourselves talking to a President of the Bandidos bikie gang, Chiang Mai division. Well alrighty then. Turns out he has since retired when he met his wife and had a baby, he said it was too dangerous and he wanted to be there for his family, but still. Yeah. He showed us all his patches and stuff, he was totes legit. The poor guy works in Bangkok kind of like a FIFO situation, with his family still living in Chiang Mai (Chiang Mai is 700km to the north). He sells boat tours and works from 5am until 9pm every single day. He lives and sleeps in a tiny little room on the pier behind his counter and job shares with his father. So his father is in Chiang Mai looking after his family right now and they will swap over every few weeks. He asked us if we had been to the Grand Palace and we excitedly told him that we had. Turns out that he has never even seen it himself, and it is not far at all from his boat pier. He never gets a day off, just works all the time. He told us how sad he was when his King died and he wasn't able to go and pay his respects at the palace while he lay in state and wasn't able to attend the funeral. He was truly serious, the man told us he was crying but could only watch the funeral ceremonies on television because he couldn't leave work to attend. The Thai people had serious love for the late King.Anyway after a great chat we said our goodbyes to Tam because our boat had arrived, I loved this experience talking to a local who told us honestly and candidly about his life. Our first real 'friend' made I reckon.

Anyway, so our boat arrived. Loy Nava dinner cruise. The boat is a beautiful traditional teak wood boat with some fairy lights lining the windows, so it looks really lovely. We are at table 3, which is close to the front and we have a beautiful view out the window, though we wondered later what the people at the front of the boat paid because I didn't see any options for paying a bit more for 'front of boat' seats. We found out later that it was the lady's birthday, so she got the good seat. Dammit! I totally could have pulled the birthday card! Never mind, our seats were still great.

The views of Bangkok's temples lit up at night from the river were amazing. Really pretty, and our food was good. I fucked up the entree, there was a pomelo fruit thing served on a leaf and I just kind of ate it off the leaf with a fork, and our waiter came past and said, 'No no! You eat leaf!', so he brought us another one so we could roll it up in the leaf like a spring roll and eat it properly. It was really good, coconut and pomelo fruit, Todd reckons it tasted like a Bounty bar lol. There were 3 other little entrees on the serving platter too, all really good! Some chicken wrapped in a pandan leaf (which you DON'T eat.....talk about confusing!), a tofu bit in some sauce and a chicken satay in a shot glass. All food was great!

We had a veggie soup next and then for mains we got green curry chicken, beef massaman, roast duck salad, crispy pork cakes and stir fried veggies in oyster sauce. Plus both white and brown rice. All food was good, but clearly made with non-Thai people in mind. Not at all spicy, though they did serve it with the now familiar side dishes of butthole burning chilli condiments lol. We enjoyed our meal as we gently rocked down the Chao Phraya river with traditional Thai music playing and periodic bouts of tradtional Thai dancing as entertainment. It was so nice. Quiet and relaxing and just nice to have Toddy/Kristal time. We were soooo stuffed full by this time, but when the dessert tray came out we totally made room for that gear! Sticky rice and mango sushi roll, a jelly in the colours and shape of the Thai flag, a little pancake with tiny bananas, fruit salad and the most crazy thing I've seen, an intricately crafted tiny bird in a nest made of taro. Very cool looking, but also very sweet!

Once the dinner was done, and the boat had made it's way back to the pier we found our van driver again and chatted with the Spanish couple about the experience. Nice couple, we traded our holiday plans with them, they had just arrived and we felt a little bit expert describing what we had already done in Bangkok 😊

We came back to the room to discover that the kids had successfully navigated the Thai Subway in our hotel complex and had gotten their sandwiches and plenty of cookies. They were happily watching some anime gear in the room and all was well. So another successful day in Bangkok! I don't know why people don't like this city, we are loving it!

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[Iris Lawrence]

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Hello there Haven't heard from you for a few days. Miss the interesting blogs. Hope everthing is going well. Seen photos from Todd xox