Wednesday, April 14

Ooh, what's today's post even gonna be about?

Today we had a funny little breakfast of jackfruit and Japanese-style milk bread (shokupan) toast, topped with Nutella and peanut butter.

Since the holiday continues and our job search is on hold because of it, we continued to play tourist today, taking the train to the Siam Paragon shopping mall, which has an aquarium on the basement level!

We wandered around, checking out the many fish, seahorses, eels, lizards and snakes, poison dart frogs, penguins, and river otters (who, went we stopped by, were being fed raw shrimp in exchange for doing simple tricks—turning in circles or dipping underwater).

There is something so relaxing about walking through a dimly-lit aquarium, peering into the tanks to watch the brightly-colored fish swimming easily through the water.

Seahorse!

Another seahorse!

Turns out I really like seahorses

I promise this is the last picture of seahorses

Eels that burrow their tails in the sand. I love the little ancient city behind them.

The aquarium also had a giant tank full of sharks, sting rays, and large fish.

In one section of the aquarium, you could stand on plate glass directly over the tank, and look right down at the sharks swimming beneath you, which was...alarming.

Staring at the sharks, feeling a little freaked out

Beckoning Roman to step out onto the glass

I mean, the tank was full of big sharks.

When we left Sealife, we made our way to the mall's foodcourt, which had fewer inexpensive lunch options than we'd hoped. We did eventually find a couple Malaysian style stuffed roti for 50 baht each.

The worker making our rotis, amongst others

We also picked up a small bag of deep fried sweets (we bought a few doughnut holes and two sesame balls, and she threw in one purple sweet potato ball for luck).

Our tickets to the aquarium included admission to the nearby Madame Tussauds, so we headed there afterwards and I just...what is the point of a wax museum, again? In this digital age, when we know what celebrities actually look like? Is was so goofy just walking through and staring at not-quite-right figures of Chairman Mao and One Direction. We were the only ones in the museum and I kept imagining the wax figures all coming to life to murder us.

I mean, this one probably wouldn't try to murder us

They did have some cool lights (and some silly interactive displays).

We left Madame Tussauds to walk to another nearby mall to pick up Roman's laptop, which has been repaired. And then we left to head home.

And man, were we tired! We'd walked around five miles since we'd left the house, and were also just totally spent from all the touristing. We were apparently so tired that we neglected to get off the train at our connecting stop, and we had to get off at the next stop, then turn around and take the train in the other direction, just to get off one stop later and walk to another stop to catch the connecting train that would finally take us home.

Being a tourist is so exhausting

Back home, we did the usual—cold showers, cold beverages, chilling in our respective spaces.

In the early evening, we went out in search of dinner. We weren’t feeling up for a super long walk, but both the spots that we know and like nearby were closed, and most all the other nearby carts were shuttered.

So we decided to take a walk after all, and headed down to the busy street food area just off Rama IV Road. On the way, we saw a rather large millipede.

Roman orchestrated our dinner—we got soup with wontons, meatballs, two kinds of pork and egg noodles, and fried chicken with sticky rice, and shared it all.

And then we headed home for the night.