Last Day

Today was the perfect last day. It started with a trip for coffee this morning; mine from 7-Eleven and Kate's from Starbucks. I got Thai iced coffee, as usual, Kate chose a peppermint mocha. We enjoyed our brief stroll about the waking city, and when we returned to the oasis, Ian had cleaned a bunch of fruit and sliced up some bread and pastries and breakfast was ready. We ate leisurely, then Intrepid Aunt L decided to spend the sunny forenoon by the pool, and the rest of us, shopped and stimulated out, strolled to Loloma park and spent an hour lounging on the grass by the side of a serpentine lake, watching families paddle around in swan-shaped boats, and warily eyeing the enormous serpentine lizards--caymen? scary disgusting scaly monsters? perched on the shore or swimming slickly through the brown water. Seriously, these things were up to six feet long, and just hanging out there in the park. They didn't seem hungry for Americans, though, so I eventually relaxed. Mostly.

Roasted chestnuts were purchased on the street. The man roasting them, sitting hunched on the sidewalk, partially protected from the sun by a strip of tarp, wasn't even sweating. He leaned over a huge metal drum suspended over a fire, tirelessly stirring, with a big wooden paddle, a pile of chestnuts and hot pea gravel. And nary a drop of perspiration. Lunch was at an Indian and Thai place serving "Non and Vegetarian food", and not meaning Naan.

Around five, a Thai friend of Aunt L's and her boyfriend arrived to take us on a brief tour--which began with the about the best part of Bangkok (and, in fact, Bangkok's been quite cool in a weird, stylized, futuristic sort of way). The back of the oasis looks out over one of Bangkok's canals. There used to be many many, but slowly they've been covered over by streets and today only a few short lengths remain in much of the city, and fortunately for us, one is right at the base of the apartment building. The canal is moderately narrow, so the boats we looked down on were relatively narrow as well--but very long. And surprisingly--no, shockingly--fast for the width of the waterway. In Seattle, there are many laws and regulations, and reasons for the many laws and regulations, associated with our many bodies of water. Not so here, or the laws are just about things I can't even imagine.

Anyway, one of the many boats racing around throwing up chop is a water taxi, or maybe more accurately a water bus, which has a stop right downstairs. The seven of us, all waterbus virgins, trooped down to the low dock and waited, expectantly, for about five minutes, while one or two long boats shot past delivering evidently very important cargo. All of a sudden a long wooden boat packed with people--row by row of them like the proverbial sardines--plunged up to the dock and a deckhand wearing a purple helmet leapt off, followed by one or two passengers. While the deckhand held the boat, we threw ourselves over the gap of opaque cafe-au-lait water and into the bottom of the boat. We were barely even inside before it leapt away from the landing and we were off.

Tarps flapped along the outside over the gunwales, keeping spray off the passengers. A series of natural-fiber lines ran up and down the length of the boat overhead, for standers to hold onto. A thick canvas roof, supported by aluminum piping, kept the sun off. The, oh, 20 or so benches each ran the width of the boat--to get in or out of them, you had to climb onto the side of the boat, or just enter a row directly from shore. As we raced along, glimpses of back yards sped by. A young woman with a baby, four-story-tall bougainvilleas in coral and fuschia, hints of old canals disappearing under pavement, black liquid seeping into the water, racks of designer jeans for sale. At the second stop, everyone on the boat--100 people?--leapt off and ran to a boat up ahead. Everyone leapt onto the new boat--a sort of reverse relay--and off we went again. Suddenly, up ahead, a low bridge spanned the canal. "That's a low bridge!" I, ever observant, commented at a yell (we were perched next to the engine) to Kate. I peered again at the bridge, and suddenly felt like I was Alice in Wonderland getting very tall. No, the entire canvas roof of the boat was coming down! I ducked, Kate ducked, even the intrepid Aunt L ducked (and she's a lot closer to Thai-sized than I am). Across the boat I heard a joyous "WHOA!" from either Robert or Ian, who were thrilled, as were we, that this awesome, ridiculous, bumpy, speedy, bizarre mode of transportation existed somewhere in the world and we had found it. We went under several other low bridges, the entire boat shutting down, razor clam-like, at each bridge. We sped past five boys jumping on a small floating dock and gave them some breakers to dive into, passed the return taxi at a bumpy, splashy gallop, and pulled up, way too soon, at our destination. I will say without hestitation that the Bangkok Waterbus is the best mass transit I've ever taken.

After visiting a (somewhat anticlimactic, but then what wouldn't be) wat and palace, we strolled through a large square . . . in front of city hall, I think . . . where several groups of people were doing aerobics, led by a pretty young man on a platform in the middle of the square.

Dinner was at a riverside cafe and featured several new dishes, including my favorite: ground peanuts and pork into which you dip vegetables. And then back home to finish packing, and as a reward for our labors share the interesting pastel and/or leaf-wrapped desserts Ian, Intrepid Aunt L and I had picked out from the fancy London-like supermarket down the street. Wow. Boy were they bad. Not so bad, perhaps, as anything from the food stall I saw this evening selling an assortment of glistening, toasty grubs, roaches, and locusts, but not really the kind of thing you'd eat to reward yourself. The coconut-milk things in banana leaves were salty as well as sweet and also contained taro and maybe jicama; the sticky rice in banana leaves was stuffed with red bean paste that looked like liver and also black beans; two transparent bon bons that appeared to have cherries in the middle instead had a small, cherry-sized piece of sweet potato, and the transparent stuff, instead of being a little mushy like confectioner's glaze, was so hard as to feel like biting into cartilage (I really grossed-out Robert with that description). A green and white flower, expected to taste like coconut gelatin, tasted like coconut gelatin with a hint of seaweed. A pink rose-shaped bon bon tasted like coconut and rose, and was very bouncy to chew. There was only one thing that was good--a sort of carmelized rice ball--and I fear that it was only good in relation to the others. After that experience, we all decided to throw in the towel and went off to our separate evening rituals, to meet in the morning--only to quickly part for several months.

Fond readers of this blog, and particularly these recent stories of Thailand, never fear, there will be at least a little more coming after I return home. The density of experience here has been too great to get a handle on everything while it's happening, so I'll take a little time, gain a little perspective, and revisit this exhilerating, fascinating, and fabulous trip from my very, very different living room in Seattle. In the meantime, Bon Voyage to me.