1st April - Hong Kong to Bangkok

We checked out of our tenement block hotel, went for a McDonald's because we didn't have time to find something worth eating and then caught the airport bus.

The waist clip of my bag got caught in the wheel of our trolley and snapped off so we spent a short while looking for a replacement one but to no avail. It's pretty crucial to me being able to get the flipping thing around though so hope we'll find one soon.

They told us at the airport that we could get on an earlier plane if we didn't mind not sitting together so we had a shorter wait than we expected. On the plane I was sat next to a nice Indian guy who'd been in China on business. He was a little shaken because the glass shower panel at his 4* hotel had not been affixed properly and had fallen off and shattered, embedding bits of itself into his leg, foot and face and so had spent the morning in hospital and then rushing to get his connecting flight to Hong Kong. He was interesting to talk to and I got to ask him lots of questions about his life and lifestyle. Unlike many people in India, him and his wife had elected to have just one child because they felt that this was the right thing to do and so we had a good discussion about that. She was a doctor but was taking time off work to look after the baby and 'relax'. We also talked about donating to charity and he told me that he only gave things to his servants and then it was only every old stuff and not money. I asked him more questions and he told me that he had three servants and that each of them were paid about £250 per month. I stopped short of asking him how much money he made (though we were often asked ourselves so it can't be too much of an offensive question) but it was intriguing to talk to someone who was so candid about their privilege. Since he spent about one month of my wages on servants and rent alone, it started to make more sense why anyone we met with money in India could not understand that we were on a budget.

Overall the plane journey was quiye enjoyable. I got to eat Indian food and also finally got to watch my Bollywood film. Well, half a Bollywood film but I still got to see dancing, singing and lots of very cheesy cheese. And since I was sat next to an Indian guy instead of Matt, I also got lots of encouragement! It wasn't the same as watching it in the cinema without a vibrating seat and lots of overexcited Indians but it was getting there.

Arrival in Thailand was straightforward and getting our Visa was the easiest yet. We just had to line up to get through immigration and they stamped our passports with an entry permit. They didn't even hassle Matt.
We took the Airport Express Train to Makkashan. It was full of people but eerily quiet. A few stops down the line I was offered a seat by a guy but we were getting off at the next stop. It turned out that he was getting off at the next stop too and was catching the same connecting Metro as us because he lived near our hostel. He offered to help us get there and we took the chance of actually getting to our destination easily for a change.

Anji & Nath

Nath turned out to be very helpful. He was a guide at Pattaya and so spoke very good English. He also used his guiding skills to point out places of interest, give us handy tips and recommend street stalls that would be safe for us to eat at. When we got to our metro stop, Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre, he asked around for us and soon deposit us safely at De Talak hostel. We offered to buy him a beer or something later and he refused, saying he just wanted to help.

We checked in and met an interesting lady sitting in the first floor shared area who started chatting to us as we made our way upstairs with the bags. She was very chatty and told us that she 'lived there' as well as filling us in on her health problems and  all sorts of stories about other peoples' exploits in the hostel. Our bags were getting very heavy so we made our excuses and left. The hostel was really shiny and clean and we had a dorm room to ourselves for the time being. We decided to head straight out and find the market that Nath had receommended to us to see if we could find a replacement clip for my bag but as we made our way downstairs we got caught again and so decided to make ourselves comfy for a 'quick' chat.

Kathleen was one of those people who just talks and talks and says whatever they think. She was 68 and had apparently decided not to bother checking herself or being diplomatic before. We got to hear more about her high blood pressure and experiences of Thai healthcare; her magnetism to men including a Thai taxi driver and an attractive old expat; her personal situation in America and life in Las Vegas; her amusement at hearing the story of a Thai terrorist who'd accidentally blown his own legs off and her very American and pretty racist opinion of terrorism and Muslims in general, just to name a few things. Half the time we didn't know what to do with ourselves and how to respond to her and the rest of the time we were biting our tongues and trying to make it clear to anyone who walked past that we were not affiliated with her. I say we, Matt was getting pretty sucked in to an episode of Junior Australian Masterchef whilst most of this was going on! The most shocking moment was when she said I would have to get used the 'bidet' style toilet system but that she quite liked it because she had the 'cleanest t**t' she'd every had! It was around that time that we'd backed away enough to make a break for it!

The first market we found in the darkness was a food market. We were glad we had closed shoes on because the ground sloshed with water from melted ice and the juices of fish, pigs and chickens and all the people working there wore wellies. There was meat at all stages of dismemberment. Groups of woman, stood around giant bowls,  yanking apart what I assumed were bits of chicken.  Carcasses of pigs also lay on slabs as men heaved and hacked to seperate them into the pieces they wanted. Younger men chopped away on small boards, piling up their work into buckets. Interspersed with these, people worked on stands, barbequing racks of meat and fish covered in homemade marinades. Matt tried some some chicken and said it was the best he'd ever tasted.

We explored the rest of the huge market, passing rows of glassy-eyed fish on trays of ice, piles of fish-related pastes and mush and all sorts of things we did and didn't recognise. Other sections had delicious looking vegetables and basket upon basket of pineapples of different sizes. The far end had chickens, piled up in cages, waiting to make their way the the other end of the market.

We left the food market and looked around for the general one that Nath had told us about but we were couldn't find it anywhere and were getting quite tired. We stopped on te square overpass bridge and watched more people at work. One woman was tackling a whole truck load of cabbages, chopping off the outer leaves before they went to market. Next to her, a group of young men unloaded box after box of fish from a lorry. The boxes were then emptied one by one so they could be methodically bashed on the head and passed down a kind of chute where we could not see what happened next. One of the boys unloading the lorry dropped a box of fish, and they flopped and wriggled across the main road, apparently trying to make a run for it. Cars and vans narrowly avoided hitting the fish and the guys trying to retrieve them. We called encouragement to one brave fish who almost made it to the other side and into the gutter before he was spotted glistening in the car headlights and retrieved. It seemed too sad to watch him end up in the chute and so we made our way back to the hostel and bed.