Bangkok Day 1

We flew from Portland to San Francisco where we met up with Vida and Dallas. The flight from SF to Tokyo was about 10 hours, followed by a 3 hour layover then a 6 hour flight to Bangkok. Sounds kind of like a nightmare with a 2-year-old, but surprise surprise Riley did remarkably well. She played with her little bag of toys (which has expanded and improved since the Japan trip), did her puzzles, cut up the airline magazine with her cute ladybug scissors, read books and sang a lot of songs. And she slept. Something about takeoff and landing makes her really sleepy. The ears thing doesn’t seem to be a problem as long as she has something to drink and raisins to chew on. I think she cried once for about 2 minutes when she was really tired and didn’t want to
sit down for landing.

We arrived in Bangkok at midnight (3pm California time) and headed to the Oriental, which is an amazing hotel. There were flowers everywhere and fountains and elephant statues. Took a while to get Riley to sleep but she eventually did. We woke up pretty early and raised the curtains to find a whole wall of windows looking out onto the river. We somehow got a free upgrade to pretty awesome rooms… more like a suite then a room really. Breakfest buffet was included, and so delicious. Fresh fruit of all sorts and just lots of yummy, pretty food. We met up with Vida and Dallas and ate and ate and ate and watched the boats go by at our table right along side the river.

When we finally headed out, we decided to take the Skytrain to Jim Thompson’s house, who’s this guy who got rich by bringing Thai silk to the west. He built a big traditional Thai house and filled it with beautiful art and ceramics. Riley’s favorite part was all the big ceramic vases filled with fish. The women working there kept giving her little origami animals that she enjoyed as well. After we had a delicious Thai lunch (so good) of noodles and spicy soup and salad made of pomelo (big citrus fruit similar to grapefruit), peanuts and fried garlic (I know that doesn’t sound so good, but I couldn’t get enough). We then headed off to Wang Suan Pakkard (“Palace of the Lettuce Garden”) where Princess Chumbhot of Nakhon Sawan used to live. It’s a collection of teak houses centered around a garden with a private canal (Klong) through the middle. They gave us fans, and Riley had great fun throwing them off the second floor of one of the houses down into the garden. On the way over a lady on the train had given Riley little orange hair bands with animals on them, and Riley enjoyed flinging those off the balcony as well. (She seems to be just as popular here as in Japan, only here it’s not just the women who are interested, everyone seems to want to touch her cheeks.) We were pretty hot and tired, so we sat around quite a bit and then decided to head home and enjoy our hotel. The rest of the day we spent lounging by the pool and swimming. In the evening we went on a dinner cruise down the river, which would have been great except we were SO tired. Riley promptly fell asleep across my and Sage’s laps at the table, and by the end I was sleeping with my head on the table as well. Cruising down the river was nice though. We all noted the similarity to Burning Man… the boats on the river were all lit up with somewhat gaudy lights making them seem similar to Art Cars on the playa. Apparently the king is turning 80, so they were all plastered with “We love the king” and various birthday messages in vivid color. Even the temples beared resemblance to those that get built every year. (Hope that’s not too sacriligious!)

Riley had some trouble falling asleep that night, despite being so tired.

Click here for pictures of Day 1 in Bangkok

(We keep procrastinating getting these posts up, so we just decided to give up on integrating the pictures…)