Final Day in Bangkok

Our overnight train from Laos brought us back to Bangkok at about 8 in the morning on Thursday. Some of the people we met/saw on the trains: a young American/Thai/Lao family of four going back to visit relatives, an older German man who talked incessantly, a middle-aged German who lives in Laos and treats the locals with typically German disrespect, an American from Hawaii, a group of Irish 30-something women who drank and stayed up late, a number of other western backpackers, and various Thais and Laos.

Ying picked us up at the Bangkok train station, along with her friend Soda (or Da, for short). They took us around on some final sightseeing, first to an old military ship in a park near the mouth of the Chao Phraya River, where it opens into the Gulf of Thailand. We were free to meander through the whole ship.

Leaving the park, we spotted a big reptile on the side of the little road and stopped to take pictures. Daniel classified it as a monitor lizard. Its length was 4-5 feet.

Next, Ying and Da took us to a spot to catch a ferry across the wide mouth of the Chao Phraya to a market area. Loads of fresh seafood, some dried, some still breathing and jumping out of their displays onto the surrounding floor space, where they were quickly picked up and returned to their displays. In addition to the seafood, other meats, also lots of produce of kinds both familiar and exotic, and the spices that give the flavor to the Thai dishes we’ve been enjoying. A few pictures here, more in a Facebook album labeled Final Day in Bangkok.

The four of us then stopped at a little sidewalk restaurant for lunch, good food as always. After lunch we headed back to Jai and Ying’s home, and Jai and I were able to have a very good and meaningful conversation about some of the things I wrote about earlier.

As evening approached, Daniel and I were invited along with Jai and Ying to the home of another couple from the church there, for supper. Like Jai’s house, theirs was also a fairly large home with nice features, but I noticed there was almost no furniture visible. Nearly all of it was still upstairs, where they had moved it in preparation for the flooding that recently plagued central Thailand. Their home didn’t suffer, but there was no way to be sure ahead of time how bad the flooding would get in any particular area.

Finally, we departed, Jai and Ying driving us out to the airport for our late-night, overnight flight to Tokyo. We would still have the following day in Japan, but at this point we felt our trip beginning to come to a close. In the airport we changed our Thai baht into dollars and yen, and said goodbye to our new Thai friends Jai and Ying.

(some of the spices that give so much flavor to Thai cooking)