With all the noise, pol­lu­tion, great train sys­tems, muggy weather, over pop­u­la­tion, tons of traf­fic and not being able to com­mu­ni­cate with our cab­bie, we breathed a deep sigh.  It took about 20 hours to make the 3 hour jour­ney from Brunei to Bangkok and exactly 8 sec­onds to feel back at home.  We checked into a mod­est hotel in Sukhumvit with the huge upside of apart­ment style accom­mo­da­tion.  Our sweet suite is about the size of our FiDi flat with a full one bed­room, liv­ing room, strip kitchen and, get this, a built-in washer-dryer — a fea­ture that we haven’t known since LA.

First stop: Stock up on healthy eats from Bangkok’s ver­sion of Whole Foods.

Sec­ond stop: Drag bags of gro­ceries up the stairs, over the turn­stile and onto the crowded rush hour train.

Third stop: Exit train, take 5 steps towards the turn­stile, notice that every­one is frozen in a tableau and then real­ize that the Thai anthem is being broad­cast through the station’s inter­com.  So then, freeze too.

Fourth stop: Think about how sur­real this all is.  Finally get what the high school drama teacher was going on about.

Final stop: Home, unpack, make guac’.

Next: Extend our stay from 5 days to 17.  Also need to fig­ure out even the small­est bit of this lan­guage — with they’re Abugida alpha­bet, five tones and appar­ent need to end each phrase with ‘khrap’ and ‘kha’ for men and women, respec­tively.  We’re really far from any­thing famil­iar.  At least in Malay we could work our way through pho­net­i­cally.  That said, the sub­tleties of pro­nun­ci­a­tion even in Malay resulted in hit or miss sit­u­a­tions where blank stares fol­lowed by hys­ter­i­cal laugh­ter often summed up the lat­ter.  We hear that things could be much worse in Thai­land where the five tones on the word “ma” can change the mean­ing from doc­tor to donkey.

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