Sunday, May 9

Another quiet couple of days. We've been riding the bus, texting with agents, connecting with family, looking at apartments, and doing a little more grocery/kitchenware shopping for Wednesday's dinner.

On Saturday, we picked up lunch on Rama IV road—we got spicy chicken with holy basil and a fried egg (pad krapow gai) and two little bundles of steamed glutinous rice, wrapped in banana leaves. We see these everywhere, but this was our first time buying them. Neither of us particularly liked them—one package had two wrapped bundles of rice steamed with something purple—sweet potato? taro?—and a few cooked beans. The other bundle contained rice steamed with maybe some kind of plum? They were both kinda sweet and spiced in a way we didn't really care for.

But, no matter! Our neighbor, Nong (who is Thai and is married to Willy, the South African) has been busy at the little table they have set up in the alley in front of their house (where they eat all their meals), stripping the outside skin off these foot-long green vegetables. At lunch time, she gave us a bowl with some of the cooked vegetable, served in a mildly spicy sauce. The vegetables were fibrous, but good, and rounded out the meal when we opted not to eat the glutinous rice bundles.

Also, Nong gave us some beautiful fresh pandan leaves that she cut from the plant in her garden, and I imagined myself a tiger in the jungle.

Here is another tiger in the jungle, absolutely fixated on a hole in the tree planter.

For dinner on Saturday, we went to Suan Phlu, where I got spicy boat noodles (a soup with a rich broth that's been thickened with blood) and Roman had pad thai with crispy pork.

On Sunday afternoon, after looking at a few apartments, I stopped off at Emquartier mall while Roman went on home. As I was leaving Lumphini station, Roman texted me a warning that had started pouring outside. I stepped off the escalator to exit the station, and looked out at a deluge of rain.

I ran through the downpour to the nearest 7-Eleven, where I bought an umbrella, but I was already soaked through and shivering from the cold. I picked up some pork noodle soup to go and headed home to take a rare hot shower.

We saw some interesting apartments today—three different places in the same large complex, which was built along a canal. The area was quiet and pretty, with two swimming pools and lots of green areas. Several of the balconies looked out onto the canal, which made for a lovely view. But the location is far from Roman's work and we're not sure how practical it would be. We'll going to look at some more apartments tomorrow, and we'll see how we feel then.