Tuesday, March 30

I woke up early because I can't help it and because we are in Bangkok!

We had some of the pineapple I bought off a street vendor last night...

And then I dashed down to the street to buy us an almond croissant and little spinach puffs from a vendor we'd seen yesterday.

As we ate, Roman asked me if it felt weird to be eating breakfast with another person. I realized it didn't—this kind of thing already seems normal, and the Maple Hotel feels like 1,000 years and 1,000 miles away.

We meditated, wrote some emails, played on our devices, and then headed out. We took the BTS Skytrain to Thong Lo, a neighborhood I wanted to check out, to see if we might want to rent an Airbnb around there. I've heard it's a fun, kind of hipstery neighborhood, and we wanted to see if we liked the feel of it.

View form the Thong Lo train stop

Thong Lo had a nice vibe—it's not nearly as busy as Si Lom which, although fun, has so many cars and people to navigate around, it can get exhausting. There was a mix of inexpensive eateries and upscale coffee shops, restaurants, and boutiques. I tried to take more pictures of the streets today—I thought, if I were reading this blog, I'd want to have a sense of what Bangkok looks like. I'm never totally satisfied with my attempts to capture the vibe of a place from street level, but I tried.

Cool building in Thong Lo

Flower shop

Roman with soda water

I also took pictures of flowers.

A Silver Trumpet Tree, I think

Purple bougainvillea

If we are in a battle with Bangkok's heat, we are currently losing. We stop constantly to buy soda waters, sit down in cafés for cold drinks, or check out air-conditioned shops, and we are still constantly overwhelmed by the heat and humidity.

Doing our best

We wandered up Thong Lor street and down Ekkamai street, stopping at a place I had read about online to get khao soi, one of our favorite dishes from Chang Mai. I had expected a simple eatery, but the restaurant was the kind of, like, hip café I could imagine walking into in Portland, Oregon.

The khao soi (a kind of curry soup with soft egg noodles, fried egg noodles and beef, served with sliced onions and pickled mustard greens), was more expensive that what we had in Chang Mai, but it was good.

And then we made our way back to Si Lom, once again overheated and worn out.

After a stop off in our room for cold drinks and cold showers, we went to a salon down the street and got haircuts. They washed our hair very thoroughly and cut it pretty nicely, too.

For dinner, we headed down to Yaowarat, Bangkok's Chinatown.