Thailand Trip, January 2013

Trip to Thailand, January 2013

Friday 1/4, Day 10

It was our last day in Thailand. Marcus was sad—“Mommy, I want to stay in Thailand forever! I want to move here! I want to stay with George!” Of course, I had a great time too, and I wouldn’t be opposed to moving here for a year. (I actually suggested to Robert that we take a year off when Marcus is eight and pull the kids out of school and sell our place and put all our stuff in storage and spend the year in Thailand, and then move to New York when Marcus is nine and settle down in schools there.) But all in all, I was ready to go home—I missed Robert dreadfully, and nothing was the same without him here.

At 7:30 we went down to the hotel’s breakfast buffet—oh my, it was wonderful. The restaurant was beautiful, with two huge buffets, indoors and out, with lots of fresh dim sum and made-to-order saimin and congee, and then all the English breakfast stuff and the continental items, and then fried rice and Malaysian-style noodles, and a fabulous assortment of things, all beautifully presented. Sam sat in a high chair and ate nearly everything, and Marcus demolished custard-filled taro buns and noodles.

Waking up on our last full day in Bangkok.

Hotel breakfast buffet.

I tried to ask the concierge what to do today, but that didn’t go so well. “Hello!” I said brightly. “I’m looking for something to do today with two children.” I held up my fingers to show the number “two” and also indicated my children—one attached to my chest, one holding my other hand. The concierge stared blankly. When he returned with someone who spoke more (some) English, she was neither rude nor helpful, but rather completely impassive. Eventually I suggested that I might take them to the zoo, and she repeated, “The zoo,” and showed it to me on a map. I sighed, took the map, found an ATM, and got the doorman to get me a cab to the zoo. The concierge did volunteer something here, to say she thought that was a bad idea as there would be traffic, but I couldn’t see sitting around the hotel waiting for traffic to die down and the heat to ramp up, so off we want.

The cab ride was 103 baht there, which I did not think was prohibitively expensive, and we spent the time in the car counting how many hot pink cabs we saw. I think Marcus won with 46, but it was very close.

We were inside Dusit Zoo at 9:00 in the morning. They waved in Marcus and just charged me for me. The zoo was completely empty, and it was fairly cool. The only people we saw at the zoo all morning were some uniformed high school students who appeared to be cutting class. I had had low expectations for the zoo, really—I just wanted a not very congested place for Marcus to run around a bit—but the zoo was really nice. It was decent as zoos go, maybe comparable to Boston’s, but as a cultural experience it was without par.

At Dusit Zoo in Bangkok.

The signs were great, the animal-shaped ATMs and trash cans were adorable, and the hippos and other animals very active, perhaps because of the time of day.

There were bikes and trikes to rent—clearly no one walked around the zoo. The high schoolers crammed 2-3 to a bike, and on the rare occasions when a bike held only one boy or girl, they would offer to put Marcus on the bike with them. He shook his head in horror and refused.

There was wifi everywhere, and tons of snack shops, including a vendor selling fish cakes (we bought three more Angry Birds ones on a stick) and sausages (we bought a hot dog inside a waffle on a stick), a 7-11 (we bought more Lay’s potato chips and some sweet chili Sun Chips and a few other snacks for our flight home), and a KFC. Everything in the KFC looked good, and unusual (KFC with a curry sauce? KFC with a fish cake on top of it?), but whatever I tried to order I was told “No have.” Eventually the man told me, “Chicken thirty minute,” and I walked away disappointed. George later said that KFC was wildly popular here, but that none of them have really figured out the timing well. We also bought an ice cream sundae from a stand that, according to the pictorial menu, seemed to have ice cream on top of mochi chunks. It turned out to be stale white bread, as far as I could tell, topped with a cherry syrup and then the ice cream on top of that. Surprising, it was. I preferred my corn popsicle from a few days before.

We had a great experience with the elephants, which you can see in the video. Marcus and I were watching the elephants eat, and then one started walking toward us. Right at us, without anyone saying “Excuse me” or “Watch out” or, really, anything at all. The elephants continued just walking down the main zoo path, and we followed them out of curiosity, and finally saw them stopping to eat some weeds and downed leaves—trash, it appeared—by the side of one of the vendor’s stalls, before they turned around and walked back.