2nd April - Bangkok

I'd had enough of constantly feeling frumpy or masculine or underdressed or hot so we spent the whole morning looking for more feminine, cooler clothes. I would have liked to do some market shopping but since I'm significantly larger than the average Thai lady, we ended up in Tesco Lotus and the Big C supermarkets. All the way in Thailand and I was buying clothes from flippin' Tesco!

My knees had also been gettng worse in the humidity, making steps and squat loos a dreaded necessity (I know! I'm getting so old!) so we also had quite long hunt for Glucosimine.

I did get Matt to try on some stuff too and had a go at persuading him to exchange his now massive clothes for something a little closer fitting but he said he wasn't ready for skin-tight shirts just yet.

Benjakitti Park

After the morning in the shops, we decided to check out the park that Nath has told us was like having 'Central Park' on the doorstep. On the way we saw a huge book fair wit loads of people there and decided to take a look. It was a bit of a foolish step given that we then had to fight our way back out when it dawned on us that pretty much every book was in Thai! Soon after we came upon Benjakitti Park. Now I haven't been to America (yet!) but I'm sure that Central Park is significantly bigger and contains more 'park'. Not that that was too much of a problem because initially we could see it through the railings but couldn't get in so we had to walk the whole length of it looking for an entrance gate. Most of the park space was taken up by  Lake Ratchada but it was still rather nice. It was very hot so we sat by the lake for a while eating pineapple and Matt drifted off to sleep.

We'd been planning to reduce our loads for a while but wanted to wait for somewhere where our stuff would go to a good cause. We'd asked the hostel lady and she said she was collecting together unwanted things from backpackers to take them to a local charity and so we spent a few hours sorting out our bags while we were waiting for our laundry to finish so we could hang it up. Matt had been being driven mad by his bag so I used by inherited packing skills (thanks mum!) to help.

I discovered that the rule about odd socks going missing in the wash was universal and spent ages lookig for the little blighter. I only have 3 pairs with me and though I could buy more, you apparently can't even get walking socks in Thailand, never mind leightweight, quick-drying, anti-mosquito walking socks.

We went for dinner at a local fried rice stall where one of the customers helped us out ordering what we wanted. It was good food but they did add the prawn legs seperate to the prawns and I had a job spotting them in the low light. More often than not I just had to fish them out of my mouth whenever I felt the crunch.
We spent the rest of the evening exploring the back streets. We had taken a wander down one of them, not expecting to find much and instead found out they were quiety humming with people going about their business. Many of the houses also seemed to be shops and small business so we walked past shoe-makers and ironmongers and general stores.

It was quite a change for us because even though it was actually fairly busy, it was really quite quiet and there was none of the shouting, calling or spitting we'd become accustomed to. Even though we were in Bangkok, we were on the outskirts and had seen very few white faces and yet we didn't draw any attention apart from the odd smile.