Last night in Bangkok

I woke up at exactly 8:25 for the second day in a row. It was a sunny, clear morning but quickly because overcast. I found out why it wasn’t raining. The rainy season doesn’t start for another month. This was still officially the hot season but it wasn’t so hot. We decided to check out tomorrow and head down to Pukhet so we found a travel agent that would sell us a ticket without a credit-card surcharge and bought two Business-Class seats on the 2 p.m. 747 on Thai Airways for 3100 baht each ($79). Domestic flights on Thai Airways have no advance-purchase or round-trip requirements and Business Class costs only 800 baht ($20) more than coach.

Mike and I wanted to compare the Sukhothai lunch buffet to the one at the Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit so we took a taxi to the Skytrain and then rode to Asok station, steps from the Sheraton. The content of the buffet was similar but atmosphere was a notch better at the Sukhothai. The price was lower here, 485 baht/person ($12.50) plus 10% service and 7% VAT. We lingered for a long time over coffee while we discussed the future of technological progress and the theory of relativity.

After that we decided to go back to the Grand Palace and see the parts of it we missed. We hired a tour guide named Cindy who filled us in on the historical background and guarded our shoes while we went inside the temple of the Emerald Buddha. The Emerald Buddha is actually made of jade but when it was discovered inside a layer of concrete after somebody dropped it, chipped the nose, and saw green, they said, “Emerald!” and the name stuck. The buildings housing the small statue are among the most beautiful in Thailand. Cindy said, “If you haven’t seen Emerald Buddha, you haven’t seen Thailand.”

After we paid Cindy, having bargained her down from 400 to 300 baht for the two of us ($8), we walked across the street to a park where old ladies were selling birdseed, followed around by huge flocks of marauding pigeons just waiting for them to make a sale. We got away from them as quickly as possible. We decided to try out the third Starwood property, the fabled Westin Banyan Tree, and have a drink in their 59th floor lounge. The Westin is located at the intersection of Satthorn and Rama IV roads. Rama IV was the king in The King and I. His son, Rama V (Chulalongkorn), was a very beloved king who reigned for 42 years, freed the slaves and brought roads and other signs of technological progress to Thailand. At the intersection of those two roads is the “Thai-Belgium Friendship Bridge.” As Mike explains is, “The Belgians gave it to Thailand in hopes that the Thais would buy more of them after seeing how they could be erected overnight without any hassle or traffic problems. The Thais didn’t buy any more of them.”

We entered the Westin Banyan Tree, took the elevator up to the top, and discovered that the Compass Rose lounge was closed for a private party. We asked if we could sit at a lone table outside the 60th-floor restaurant right in front of the picture windows looking out onto all of Bangkok. No problem. We ordered a couple of Long Island Iced Teas, which promptly arrived made perfectly and poured into unusual tilted tumblers. Mike said they should save these glasses for the sixth round of drinks when the customer wouldn’t be sure if it was just because he was drunk.

Our ride back to the Sheraton Royal Orchid gave us our first taste of really bad Bangkok traffic. It was a parking lot the whole way and took us an hour to go 7km. We cleaned up and met for the evening.

We decided to give Normandie a pass, both being unenamored of the Oriental. Instead we went to a second restaurant owned by the proprietor of Bobby’s Arms, the pub we had eaten at the night before. This one was called Trattoria di Roberto, an Italian place. We had some good eggplant parmigiana and some overdone steaks that could have come right out of the United galley.

We tried a few more ballet shows but nothing was happening. For the first time, we actually got ripped off at an upstairs bar: they attempted to charge us 300 baht each for the first drink. (95 baht is the going rate.) We complained, paid 100 baht each, and left. If we had wanted the hassle we could have gone to the tourist police and got our money back but we decided against it.

I came back to the Sheraton Royal Orchid and found Hunnybear on line so we had a nice chat over Yahoo Messenger, celebrating our 2.5-year anniversary of meeting in Bangkok.


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