November 12
We basically spent our hungover day eating and sleeping, but we did also manage to be somewhat productive... In the evening we went to Jhasper Fashion so David could have another fitting for his work clothes and afterwards headed over to this humongous, 10-story, extremely confusing mall to look for some fancy clothes to wear to the sky bar. We failed miserably at finding anything, so we gave up and just went to the food market as planned. The market was in Nana and we had:
- Khao Soi Kaa (some soup dish with chicken)
- a rice noodle dish that we ordered as vegetarian but actually came out loaded with weird fish and stuff that we didn't like
- aweeeesome Tom Yum soup
- superb pad Thai made by some crazy chef who was featured on some Iron Chef show or something
- mango with sticky rice mmmmmm so good
November 13
Feeling refreshed after waking up at 10am in our pitch black cave of a room (no windows!), we wandered to the Israeli restaurant down the street where we dined on some delicious Shakshuka and pita and Israeli salad :). Midway through we made up our minds to go to Chiang Mai for the lantern festival, rather than go to Cambodia like our plan from 12 hours prior... Therefore we researched buses and visas (we'd have to do a visa run now since we've almost been in Thailand for 30 days!!!) and found that doing the run from Chiang Mai would be cheaper and better overall. So, with that settled we embarked on what we thought would be a 1 hour journey to the bus station to buy our bus tickets for tonight. We went local and caught the 15 bus to BTS (the sky train station) which ended up free somehow, and we also met THE CUTEST little, old Thai man who struck up conversation with us about Miami (and knew the UM Hurricanes!!) and told us about how in the 50's he hitch hiked from Massachusetts to Florida! His English was phenomenal and we had such a great time talking with him! Our stop came so we had to get off the bus, and we quickly bought our tickets for the sky train and rode it to Mo Chit (which I had a really difficult time not saying awkwardly since everyone was pronouncing it "mo' shit"...). Once we got to the Mo Chit stop, we figured it would be easy to find the bus terminal since we assumed it would just be there... Everyone made it seem that way? So we asked someone to make sure and they pointed us towards exit 1 and we were off. We took a glance at the map, saw "Department of Land Transportation" as the only possible option and made our way there. Once at the DLT, we wandered inside what was definitely the government building I'm sure you all assumed it was when you first read it, and looked extremely out of place and confused. We managed to flag down the help of some business guy who drew us quite an unhelpful map to the bus station, that we followed straight into a huge market with flowers and food - It was nice but definitely not the bus station. So, we enlisted the help of the only white guy we found and he told us to take a cab, so we did. Dumb and dumber finally got to the bus station ~1.5 hours since we first left, and managed to purchase some tickets for the VIP bus to Chiang Mai that night at 8:30pm. With that out of the way, a funny little Thai man at the information desk drew us a new map guiding us to the local bus area where we could catch the 3 all the way home, which is what we did! And it took another 1.5 hours in traffic, with a creepy man behind us pointing at stuff, weirdly touching my hair, and mimicking us clapping or something, and another dude who woke himself up with a cough/spit up that was quite pleasant. We decided not to hate on the bus ride too much though since it only cost us 8 baht and there are protests going on in Bangkok which were probably the reason for the unnecessarily long trip. We eventually got back to the Universe Inn and gathered up David to go get an awkwardly late lunch/early dinner at that hole in the wall spot we liked earlier! Afterwards, we bought some new tank tops on Khao San road and coconut ice cream on Rambuttri (?) and headed home to shower and pack.
Knowing what not to do, we were able to efficiently get back to the bus station by 8:15 to get on our extremely ballin' bus ride where I'm sitting in giant reclining seats with my fuzzy blanket and bread/cupcake snack box in my lap!
