Day Eighteen - 23rd Sept. 2009 - Mr. Song's revisited.
Today it was the day to revisit Mr. Song the tailor. We took some clothes to him a couple of weeks back to be cloned.
Our hotel is great but the location is not so good. It takes an hour to get to Mr. Song's shop by Tuk Tuk and Skytrain. Once there we had a quick fitting session of some of the items that were already in his shop. We had to wait thirty minutes for the remaining clothes to be delivered from his factory so we walked around the area and had a snack of some tasty spring rolls from a little street restaurant. The street restaurants are great. If you ask for a take away they put all of the dishes in to little air filled plastic bags so you end up with eight or nine little plastic bags each filled with a different part of the meal. In Thailand they put evening in plastic bags. Back to Mr. Song's and arranged to collect our new threads on Wednesday after he'd finished some final fine tuning.
Gisela wanted to return to China town to do some shopping before we left so we took the taxi boat and had a brief walk around the market. You will never realize how much junk is produced by humans until you visit the market in China town. There were markets the size of football fields that sold on one thing, for example hair decorations. Every different stand on the hair decoration market sold a different item, a different design or a different color for a few pennies. Then there were markets that only sold soft toys, plastic bags and bottles and so on. After a while walking around the market it started to get hot and combined with the noise and smell of the traffic it was time to get out of there.
Lunch was the next stop. Our original plan was to go for lunch near the first hotel we stayed at in Bangkok. Walking to the boat taxi station we happened across a kind of workers café. Outside the café were 20 or so large saucepans filled with different types of food from vegetables in various sauces, different meats to a strange dish of made from rotten boiled eggs and beef. The idea was to take a plate of rice or noodles and then select your veggies or meat from the saucepans. I had rice with Lemongrass in a spicy sauce and broccoli, Gisela choose rice with something that resembled chicken.. again in a (very) hot sauce. Washed down with a couple of large Singha beers it was a tasty lunch break. It was not only tasty but dead cheap. Our lunch and beers came to 180 bhat (about 4 euros)
As it was so hot we figured it would be a good idea to head back to the hotel for a swim in the pool and a rest. Due to the heat (it was 40 degrees at this stage) we were forced to stop off at the Oriental hotel for a beer on the terrace by the river before taking the Oriental's taxi boat to the Skytrain station.
A swim in the pool and an afternoon snooze before the evening's activities.
At around 8pm we left to go to Patpong. Gisela twisted my arm to take a motor cycle taxi. I wasn't so keen. The drivers are safe enough but it was the rest of the road users that I was worried about. We negotiated a price with two drivers and hopped on board. Gisela was safely installed with her little red safety helmet, I was sans helmet and although the journey was nice enough I must admit that I was worried about being vegitized by some manic taxi driver.
Arrived in Patpong (mobbed by guys invitinjg us to a Ping Pong show). A few beers in a couple of bars. The monsoon rain came and a black cloud hung over the night.
Jason & Gisela
