Starting out in Thailand

It has taken quite some time to delete all the spam entries that got into this blog! There were more spam entries than entries for walking the Camino.

We headed to Thailand today on Qatar Airways, via Doha with a very early morning start, 3am. But we were kindly given a space available upgrade to business class which of course made David very happy. The flight from Doha to Bangkok was basically a 6 hour day-time flight so the "bed" aspect of the seat was not really as necessary, but the massage part if it is always wonderful.

Arriving in Bangkok's international airport was very easy as we were given VIP coupons for the immigration process being in Business Class . We had gotten a mutliple entry visa from the Thai embassy before leaving DC. Our bags arrived with no problems and while not the Camino 20 pounds, we still are traveling pretty light with alot of the same Camino clothes but now more shoes, laptops, cameras, 2 cell phones each etc. As we came out of customs we found a shop to get ourselves Thai SIM cards. This was actually done very efficently for about $12 each including 300 minutes.

We took a public taxi to our hotel Center Point Silom Hotel. Good thing the travel voucher showed the hotel name and address in thai so we could point it out to the taxi driver! The hotel's rooms are serviced apartments which have small kitchens, refrigerator/freezer, washing machine etc. We have a nice river view as well all for $100 per night including breakfast and free wireless in the room. 

As to the recent political disturbances, there was no sign of redshirts on any of the roads we were on.  There were security guards/police at the airport and around the airport.  The Songkran festival, thai New Year's is going on, so the thais are throwing and spraying water.  So far we have only seen  white paint (soap?) on their faces.  There is one more day of this holiday so we will not be able to go and apply for our Burma visa as we had hoped.

It is always difficult the first few days in a new language enviroment. Actually Thailand may take more than just a few days as the language with all the different tones is not easy to figure out! We went to a grocery store that was in the basement of the shopping mall next to the hotel and trying to read the labels for the laundry detergent was impossible. On the Camino we had totally taken all the color out of our clothes by running the washing machine way too long (3 hours....) with a soap that had a high percentage of bleach. I was trying to learn from that mistake and really studying the detergents! I have some now but will ask housekeeping to show me how to use the machine in the next day or two. The supply of fruit here is another interesting dilema - there was red dragon fruit we wanted to try but could not figure out how to eat it so it was left for another day and we came home with Asian pears, some wine (expensive relative to the beers) and bottled water. We had dinner in the local restraunt just outside the grocery store. Everyone else was cooking their meals in pots at the table---we couldn't figure that out so just ordered some noodles, a soup and a couple of other items for the huge bill of $8 with tip. I have to read the guidebook on Thai food. Last time we were here was with Aniesa and Jonathan back in 1993.

I found a website that has free downloads for tourist phrases of various languages so I downloaded Thai, Lano and Cambodian.