January 12th in Bangkok
We managed to FaceTime with Andrea, Francis, Charlotte and Amelia for the girls’ 10th birthday. Remember we are 13 hours ahead of Saskatchewan time, 12 hours ahead of Alberta. It’s still January 11th back in Canada! It was nice to see them, the birthday girls were all dressed up in pretty dresses, one in gold, the other in silver. They were having a nice supper at home to celebrate.
We then Skyped with Linda’s mom. She filled us in on the weather and we filled her in on our recent activities. This is the day we get another covid test to complete our Test and Go requirements. The guy dug deep in Gary’s nose, looked at the stick and went in again another inch. Gary has had sinus surgery and it seems the testers can’t believe how open his nostrils are, so they go in even deeper. This is getting a bit old because it happens every time! There is likely no resistance to the stick so they ram it in more. When they hit tonsils they are usually happy. Linda was watching and she had to turn away on the second strike! All this got Linda’s adrenaline going because she was next! Linda’s swab was a piece of cake (says Gary), at least they only went in once. Gary said the swab made it to his tonsils, so if there was any covid they would find it.
We picked up some groceries at the mall and came back to eat a salad with passion fruit dressing, chips and tea. FYI, passion fruit dressing is passion fruit scooped onto a plate of lettuce! We tried it once because we had nothing else and now it’s a go to salad dressing is Thailand.
Off to the store to buy a new GoPro battery, the cheap Amazon one lasted a couple of charges and is dead. Sadly, we could not find a store that sold batteries within a half hour ride on the BTS or MTR. We are down to only 2 batteries now and we expect the second amazon battery to die any day. We’ll keep our eyes open in Phuket for an electronics & camera place.
We then headed for a walk around Benjakitti Park, also called Benchakitti. We walked about 7.5 km around the park. There are elevated walkways that take you over wetlands, around trees and shrubs. There is a lake and an amphitheatre in one section. Since it is hot and dry now, there are sprinklers running in many areas around the park watering the grass, trees and flowering shrubs. The park encompasses a huge area that is completely surrounded by high rise buildings.
We returned to our room and drank a beer (one beer split between the two of us) we had bought this morning and left in the fridge. We even left glasses in the freezer to chill! It was ice cold and we could have drank more. After a bit of a rest we walked back toward Cali-Mex where we hoped we would find some place better to eat. Our energy level was getting low so we settled on the place we ate 2 nights ago, Cali-Mex. We had a repeat of the nachos, Gary had Baja fish tacos and Linda had a quesadilla. On our walk back to the hotel we picked up some soda water instead of more beer. It is possible to drink too much beer in this heat and not enough water. Soda water seemed like a good compromise. After walking 10.2 km today, most of it during the hottest part of the day, we sat around drinking water to try and rehydrate. We crashed by 9pm.