Laying Low

Bangkok (January 19, 2010)

My sniffles of the past couple of days turned into a very unpleasant cold overnight. Nevertheless, I scrambled downstairs to say goodbye and beg for baht. (Thanks to all who sold or donated!)

At the breakfast buffet, I ate fruit and a couple bowls of rice porridge with chicken, suitably spiced up with fried garlic, chilli-infused vinegar, a bit of fish sauce, and a sprinkling of dried red chillies and white pepper. With the addition of several cups of insanely strong hot tea, my head and throat started to clear, but it’s still probably a good idea to lay low for the rest of the week: I need to be in top condition for snorkeling in six short days.

After processing a few videos, I headed over to My Choice for a lunch of spicy chicken soup with coconut milk. This had a serious decongestant effect, and I had to discreetly use a couple of napkins as tissues. Next stop was the local internet place, since video uploads require some serious bandwidth. Laptop users are directed to a neighboring room with the door wide open and no A/C. Perfect!

After a brief nap, I awoke to my find computer completely useless with an Unmountable Boot Volume. Sounds really, really bad. I needed a screwdriver to investigate further so went out shopping for tools — and an immersion heater so I could make tea in my room. I returned with two toolkits and a tall Sanyo hot water heater (with the handy keep warm feature). After much effort, and with a detour to Grand Ramen for an immense bowl of hot and sour ramen, I got my backup hard drive installed in my laptop, and started some diagnostics on my main drive while I drifted off to fitful sleep.

Bangkok (January 20, 2010)

I was awakened around 3am by the loud sound Windows makes when it restarts itself. Apparently an automatic update had installed, and now Windows was repairing my hard drive. Hmmm, I think I was supposed to do a backup first? Well, it seemed worse to interrupt it than to let it do its thing, and in the end, I managed to get most of my hard drive uncorrupted. I later noticed some random problems with missing files, and I suspect there will be more to sort out over the coming days.

I forced myself to get up and go to the breakfast buffet by 8:45: it’s bad enough that the food has been sitting there for a couple hours already, I didn’t want the very last dregs. But the selection was disappointing, far less interesting than yesterday. I’m eating bananas in my room for extra sustenance.

After running two rounds of tap water through my new water warmer, I heated up some bottled drinking water and made tea in one of the large celadon mugs I purchased at Mengrai Kilns in Chiang Mai. Uh-oh, there’s a slightly unsightly crack in the mug under the glazing, so I guess this one’s a keeper for me. Well, you probably wouldn’t have wanted even a perfect mug used by a sick person… Meanwhile, I bought 10 hours of expensive wireless access here at the hotel so I wouldn’t have to expose more people to my cough.

Eventually I needed lunch. I had planned to go to the excellent noodle place around the corner, but by 1:15 it was closed, so I hiked up Soi Thonglor until eventually I saw the sign of the “bowl,” which indicates a good restaurant. After making my way across the street (which is no easy feat), I found myself at Thon Krueng; now I know why we always drove here. I ate soup and drank hot tea (and ate a side of morning glories) to the bursting point and stumbled back to the hotel for a nap. I can’t remember the last time my temperature exceeded 100 degrees, but I’m going to assume my immune system knows what it’s doing. And I will be considering room service.

Come dinner time, I’ve got to get out of here. Across Sukhumvit, on Soi 38, many street carts are active in the evening. The selection ranges from noodles and fruit smoothies to roti (with egg or bananas) and chicken on a stick. A friendly hawker draws me into a fairly large restaurant with a bowl of egg noodles topped with not just Chinese-style BBQ pork, but crispy skin pork, wontons, and crab meat. The meat is tasty but sparse, and the flavor of the broth is basic; still, for 50 baht (about $1.50), I think it easily challenges what I could have gotten from room service. I wandered the sidewalk looking for the man who was roasting bananas (these are bagged with a palm sugar sauce) but I guess he sold out and went home. This is one of the problems with street food in this neighborhood: you either have to buy it when it’s available, or go without. I’ll take it as an opportunity to not overeat.

Bangkok (January 21, 2010)

I had not intended to wake up at 4:00 am. Nor was it a good idea to check my email at that hour. The rice porridge on the breakfast buffet had tender pork meatballs. After that, much napping would follow before I could get back on track.

For dinner I visited a small nearby shop whose entire menu was devoted to rice porridge: porridge with shrimp, porridge with duck meat and blood, porridge with mixed seafood, page after page of photos culminating in porridge with all of the above. Oh, and on the very last page, pork dumplings that looked like siu mai in multiples of 10. I probably should have left and sought out something more exciting, but instead I had the shrimp, which seemed very fresh and had a good texture. I stopped for an order of mango with sticky rice at the fruit shop, and the saleslady seemed to find my shirt humorous. The elephants and the word Thailand seem very straightforward, but what about that Thai phrase underneath? I tried to translate it using my Thai dictionary, but couldn’t find most of the words. Hmmm, I will have to stop making fun of Thais who wear bizarre English-language t-shirts they probably don’t understand.

Tomorrow the next group meets for dinner at 6:45. In part, it’s a reunion of four of us from the 2005 trip. And we’ll have eight more snorkeling enthusiasts joining us. Should be fun, as long as I can get over this cold by Monday.