Friday
Trying to sleep in here hasn't worked for me and I'm up in a few hours. It's mid-morning, I'm starving, and convince Aaron to take me to a Sushi breakfast (a dream of mine for a few years). A few steps from the house, the motorcycle taxi drivers are hanging out as always, passing the time between fares by playing gambling games of tossing coins near a crack in the road, eating anything and everything, drinking beer, and taking turns hanging out in the hammock someone has strung up. They ask Aaron to take their picture and the next thing I know, I'm in the middle of a couple of them, arms around me and Aaron's snapping pics of me with my new friends.
Sukumvit Yee Sip Hok
We live in the Japanese district of Bangkok, so it's a short walk to a fine Sushi restaurant that serves up delicate slabs of fish for unbelievably low prices. They serve us "Japanese pizza", a dish of dough, shredded seaweed, a mayo-like drizzle, a darker drizzle, and delicate shreds of shrimp that never stop moving - curling and waving from the hot topping. I find myself captivated by the Thai soap opera playing on a small TV behind the sushi chef. The close ups, overly dramatic faces, and laughable story lines are familiar, but the set contains an elephant and men bowing on hands and feet. The wasabi is the best I've had, as is the pickled ginger, and I pass on the soy sauce to get the full flavors. The bathroom at the restaurant has the toilet up on a step and I push every button and turn every dial on the Japanese toilet. Emerging extra clean and highly amused at the whole dial-a-douche experience, I step out into the humid street and I recall I'm still in Bangkok, not in Japan.
Aaron takes me into little Japan. Our first stop is the 60-80-100 baht store. Finally, a dollar store but this one is Japanese. We walk every aisle and pull out all manner of ridiculous merchandise. We're laughing most of the time over our discoveries. My favorite is the emergency supplies bag that has the word "Emergy" screened over icons of what should be inside just in case. It's empty. Grabbing the world smallest cutting board in a kind of balsa wood, a plastic black drink tray featuring a graphic of a rabbit jumping under a half moon, and the worlds flimsiest pepper grinder, we leave.
Down the street we step into a bakery supply shop under a baking school. It's got everything in that shop you'd need to bake any delicacy. Bags of gel glucose, every frosting tip every made, Philadelphia cream cheese, piles of meltable chocolate, nuts, pans, the works. Miraculously, we leave empty handed and head to a Japanese grocery store. Avacados for less than two dollars each, a million types of miso, wine, sake, hard apple cider, the biggest cup of soup ever, and finely cut slices of meat fill this place. We pick up bacon, organic eggs, and eat samples of mango yogurt before leaving, promising to come back for a few meals. Stopping at an English pub, we have a pint and review our afternoon while watching a golf tournament here in Thailand on the television.
We're exhausted, but I've committed to meeting up with Simon, my contact here to deliver two spools of static-free grounding wire to help disarm land mines. We're all on Thai time today so it's been dark awhile before we meet a bald, British guy on a nearby corner. Simon speaks perfect Thai, so well that you don't recognize his voice when he switches languages while giving our motorbike taxis directions to the restaurant we're headed to. The three of us mount the bikes and we're winding our way through a maze of streets, up sidewalks and over rough roads. My hair -what little of it I have- is flying back as we jet between cars. Women here ride the motorbikes sidesaddle and I'm proud of how I've mastered this immediately, my right foot on the peg, right hand holding a handle, my left foot dangled over the street and touching when we make a sharp turn. I'm wanting a goPro to share this experience (it WILL happen!).
The restaurant is on We Love The King road and serves up traditional Thai royalty cuisine. The menu is a huge photo album at least 70 pages long and filled with gorgeous photographs of each dish, the name in Thai and English, and a description of the health benefits for each dish, like "aides digestion". Simon orders in his perfect Thai and Aaron is asking how long he's lived here. 22 years. We discuss his business (a dry ice sanitizing cleaning business), his wife, his house, and launch into a series of adventure stories. I make him promise to come back to town and go out with us one night in the near future. We end our evening drinking on the rooftop of our apartment, overlooking the city skyline.
It's deeply gratifying when I notice that I'm not sweating, but Simon is dripping sweat when we are hanging out. Aaron points out later that using air con all of the time makes it a lot harder to adjust to the temperatures here even when you've lived here for over two decades. When Simon leaves with his heavily-loaded backpack full of wire, I'm in bed and unconscious within 10 minutes, my feet wrapped in a towel I've drenched and stowed in the freezer to cool off the heat rash that has been keeping me up itching lately.