Bangkok is a major travel hub for Southeast Asia; if you want to fly from anywhere else to anywhere else, chances are you’ll be routed through this eastern metropolis, especially if you want to get the best fares. And hey, as long as you’re going to have to go there, you might as well stay a few days. With its blend of traditional culture and modern, somewhat westernized, amenities. there are certainly worse places you could spend a few days. And that’s what we found ourselves doing, for the third time.

Our first order of business is to acquire some cash in baht, the Thai currency — which like the currency in any other monarchy, features a portrait or photograph of the king (or queen if applicable) on every denomination, a likeness created when the monarch was decades younger, thus making the currency look not very current. Trying our best to avoid or minimize ATM fees, we’ve done some research and found that United Overseas Bank is an affiliate of our own bank, and reportedly does not charge fees for withdrawals by customers of our bank. When we scout out a UOB ATM, that turns out not to be true — there is a fee of 1.7 percent. But that’s quite reasonable compared to some of the other rates we’ve encountered.

So with a fresh batch of baht in hand, we head to a mall to look for a couple of items we’d been trying to find, including new travel-friendly utensils (e.g., a “spork”) to replace those lost or broken. Bangkok has some large and western-style malls that are hard if not impossible to find in much of Southeast Asia, and thus offers a much better range of options for hard-to-find items. Nonetheless, we come up empty on everything except a SIM card for our phone.

While at the mall, we get hungry and decide to have lunch in a little restaurant in the mall. It’s a restaurant at which customers cook the food at the table themselves, a tradition in Thailand. But there are some decidedly modern twists. You order the ingredients from a touchscreen, and they are delivered to your table by a robot. We select tofu, corn, bok choy, and mushrooms, with some traditional seasonings. It fills the bill, and our tummies, quite nicely.

While meandering through the mall, we come upon what seems to be some kind of community room, which is buzzing today with some kind of art activity. Upon examination, we find that guests, mostly children, are painting watercolor designs onto white canvas bags, which they are then able to take home. If you think we are able to resist jumping in and doing one ourselves, you just don’t know us.

The next morning, our host lady comes by to replace the light in our room — we’d notified her that it was not working. It’s a fluorescent ring light, beneath a round cover, which we’d removed at her request to take a photo of the bulb. She replaces the bulb, and later Dennis starts to put the cover back on and it literally leaps out of his hand and into the floor, and magically reduces itself to a zillion fragments.

Sheepishly, we contact the host again to inform her of the tragedy. She takes it in stride — as well she should, since it was not really our responsibility to remove the cover the cover in the first place — and says that she will file a request with Airbnb to cover the cost, and they probably will. So she does, and then Airbnb contacts us and asks for us to either pay for the damage, or dispute that we are to blame. After mulling it over a bit, we decide to just go ahead and pay it (a mere 15 bucks) in order to make certain we stay on good terms with Airbnb.

Later we go for a long walk through the neighborhood and vicinity down some narrow labyrinthine passageways, past shops initially, and then past residences. At one point, we start down a slim pathway in front of a house where a woman is sitting out front. She starts telling us in Thai, animatedly and seemingly with some urgency, that we are going the wrong way, and should turn back. We are uncertain whether she has some psychic grasp of our objectives, or a knowledge of a dragon or gang of cutthroats lurking around the corner, but we decide to take her advice and turn back.

On the way back to our apartment, we stop at the office of a dermatologist we’ve looked up to see about getting an annual checkup. The dermatologist, however, is not in the office, though she would be able to make an appointment for us to come in later. However, she doesn’t really provide the kind of examination we’re seeking — for one thing, she does not do cryotherapy. So we decide to scuttle the plan and just wait until we are in India, a few weeks later.

We also stop at the extensive historic businesses lining the canal, including cafes, shops, ice cream parlors, and a couple of arts and crafts places — across the canal from clusters of shanties where people live. Some vendors are selling bags of fish food that look lie Cheetos, except they are green, red and other vibrant colors. Evidently, the local fish are not concerned about the possible carcinogenic properties of food dyes.

Some of these rustic buildings are over 100 years old. Among them is the Artist House, which is a cafe/ art store/ performance space/ community art studio where you can sit at a table and draw, paint, or assemble a craft project from materials sold on site. It becomes very clear that we will have to return to this establishment when we are prepared to spend a little more time.

The next day, we head to the Royal Palace, since it’s on the must-see list for tourists to Bangkok. But when we get there, we are turned away because we are wearing shorts, and the policy demands “respectful” attire, as if one can’t be respectful with bare knees. Outside the entrance, there are vendors capitalizing on the ignorance of visitors like us by selling pants for 200 baht (about 6 dollars), made of stretchy material that will slip on over regular clothes. But we don’t want to spend the extra money; and besides, the pants are rather gaudy elephant print designs, and we have no desire to look like hippie trapeze artists. So we elect instead to come back another day.

9/11-13/2024