SO, after landing in the early morning we had a long exhausting day of debauchery. Well, not fully since we still haven't seen the sin city side of Bangkok, but the time for this will come. I guess it's easy enough to find descriptions of this place that talk about the colours, sounds and tastes so intense you feel like you're a vampire on Auspex and markets where you expect to see snake charmers. Or the cocktails that come with bouquets of flowers or the unbelievably low prices. Oh and by the way, scorpions are yummy and fish massage is SO MUCH FUN!!! Anyway, I'm sure a detailed description's coming (and I sure hope it involves Jules hangin off the back of a tuk-tuk for the ride from chinatown to Khaosan and us getting a fish foot massage and eventually putting our faces in and then jumping into the fishtank...) so I'll just tell you what non-obvious things stand out for me. I LOVE LOVE LOVE how everything here is not sanitary, you buy some dodgy food someone's conjured up in the street and it's the best thing you've ever had. I swear that I will do my best not to eat anything that comes in plastic packaging till the end of the trip. Also, there are "long live the king" signs everywhere and portraits of HRM... It's refreshing to be in an ACTUAL monarchy. Oh, and we went to this park where there were Thai cheerleaders practicing, and had routines that had a lot of traditional Thai elements. I guess I should also mention that when we were watching them something that looked like a crocodile came out from between all the tropical plants and into the water. And it seriously looked and moved like a crocodile but Burk says something was different so I guess it was just a really badass lizard.
Julian says it was a dragon. I mean, that it's the name of the lizard.
Then we had a cheesy but so so happy evening of toasts to friendship and smiling like idiots at each other and talking about how even though we've now been apart more than we've been together we're still what we are. I love you guys. Here's to that.
Tonight we're going to sin. It's going to be my birthday, ain't it? Here's to perfect, perfect times.
-Eva
There aren't many days which start by cycling across London, feeling good about living in such a fantastic city... This particular one, however, progressed through supervisor meetings, toasting at 30, 000 feet, desperate attempts to ease our pain by scratching off hours of waiting on a Delhi-based banana, six-to-one taxi rides, and more. Lucky I had that scorpion to keep me going. And it ended with some drunken swimming in a fish-bath while they ravaged my sorry skin, leaving me happy and refreshed.
So... what a day! It's great to be back here, great to walk the same streets again, with the same gauntlet of smells. It changes fast - one second you're hungry as you pass by a foodstall, the next you want to empty your gut as you pass by a sewer. Speaking of which, I am hungry. So I stop now.
- Jules.
