View from hotel window:
Today I went back to MBK for my first meal of the day, chicken and cashews with rice at Thai Fusion, plus a multi-fruit lassi.
Food choice well displayed and labelled:
After lunch I visited Jim Thompson's House, in the next lane along from the hotel. Jim was an American architect who came to Thailand as an intelligence agent at the end of world war 2 and liked it so much he came back to live. He played an important role in marketing Thai silk products and thus revitalised a dying cottage industry, then he became an aficionado and collector of south east Asian art and artefacts, and built a home from old Thai teak houses, filled it with artworks and created a jungle-like garden as a setting. His favourite pet was a cockatoo, which he named ... “Cocky”. The house and grounds are delightful, the interesting artworks vary from a 7th century statue of Buddha (minus head and hand) to 5-colour porcelain made in China to Thai designs, to Burmese tapestries illustrating the wedding ceremony.
The house is next to a canal (klong), so I wandered along this and watched ferry boats conveying peak-hour workers home. I got on one going in the direction of the old city. The sides were protected by blue plastic against wind and spray from the not so clean canal water. I pulled one down so I could enjoy the view, but a passenger behind me yanked it up again with the rope for this purpose.
The boat stopped at a bridge and a lady informed me I needed to get out. There were two bridges, both historical and described on a plaque in Thai and English. I discovered where I was on my map (just at the old moat surrounding the old city) and decided not to walk in the direction of the Democracy Monument, as I remembered from TV that this had been a scene of demonstrations. Instead I wandered though a temple complex and then along a klong so small it wasn’t on my map. It was however full of people and stalls and houses and animals and plants and vehicles, just a few blocks away from main roads and tourist areas, but very local and poor. Walking by rooms with TV’s, beds, washing, obviously people’s homes. Open air cooking, a set of washing machines (laundromat?), two games machines, lots of food, lots of rubbish.
At the end, a huge intersection, I crossed at red in the shadow of some travellers who seemed to know their way, and landed in the Khao San Road. After being confronted with zero food at 11 pm last night, I wanted to check out a livelier area. And indeed it was.
Dinner: Vegetarian Pad Thai.
A parallel street, Rambuttri or something, was not so hectic, very pleasant in fact. Young tourists getting their legs massaged or their feet nibbled by fish.
Long odyssey home involving several buses, unsuccessful. Ended up in a tuk-tuk.
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