Bangkok

We are in Bangkok, Thailand, somewhere. It’s a very hot, muggy city. It’s very busy, the freeways jammed with newer vehicles. Most people that we see are well-dressed, though it’s a very young sample. There are street vendors, cabs and tuk-tuks, dogs and cats, but no cows wandering about.

It is still called the Kingdom of Thailand, and at various times (as recently as 1949) the Kingdom of Siam. We took a long taxicab ride today to King’s Royal Park, a very large open area with exhibits and tributes to royalty. Either royalty admires itself very much or is very much admired.

We also went to the corner shopping mall – maybe nine stories of shops, most selling clothing for young people. There are two floors of restaurants dedicated to San Francisco, and one large area for electronics. I was hoping to perhaps score a cheap IPad, but Apple is way too smart to allow its customers to play arbitrage. It’s $600 here, $529 in the US.

It seems a blended western/Asian culture, prosperous and busy. There are few who speak English, so we are in difficulties at times, but hand gestures get us through. We could not get across to our cab driver where we wanted to go after king’s Royal Park (Key Bangkok Hotel) but I handed him our room key, and he found the address on the back.

But we are only here to meet out daughter, after which we head south to Ko Tao, an island off the southern part of the country in the Gulf of Thailand. There we plan to do nothing, or at least have a week of nothing planned.

It’s very hot, I’m very white.