Shopping, sightseeing and lunching with three ladies took its toll on Freddie boy today… After spending a good while choosing our gift for Leelawadee, the most beautiful high chair cum swaying soother cum sleeper, I appropriately named the “space station”, we had lunch in the Emporium shopping centre at Piri Piri with Poon and Leelawadee… sated and ready for the next leg of our day out, we ventured out into the sunny, buzzing and fearfully hot city and visited a beautiful ornate park. Small in size it still encompassed everything one would need for recreation, leisure and peaceful meditative beauty. From an all sport court, basketball court, open air swimming pool, beautiful landscaped gardens and tended trees to works of art in the form of alabaster statues and bright golden epitaphs, this was a place of great beauty in amongst the hubbub of a frenetic metropolis.
After all the recreational walking and sightseeing, it was time for Fred’s delight, a sports bar headed off the main road. Passing a sea of taxi cabs and heat laden buses we wound our way across the road and into a sports bar called appropriately “The Sportsman”. Here I knew Fred would be in his element… air con, ice cold draught beer, international newspapers, big screens showing the previous nights’ Premier League footie game, NFL and some other extreme sport and then an even larger screen showing a channel relating to, of all things, surfing and skiing lol!!! Cooled one down just watching it….
Poon went back to the department store to pick up, what we believed would be the lightweight “space station”. On her return with what appeared to be a box the size of Poons lol… we had to leave Fred’s comfort zone as at 5 o’clock no children (including babies in pushchairs) were allowed. Fred sighed, got up and made his final visit to the loo before the lovely “stand still in traffic” cab ride back to the hotel…
I’m absolutely fascinated by the traffic situation in central Bangkok… traffic lights have a countdown at junctions… a traffic officer sits in his little box overseeing the traffic on his computer screens and decides what time to add to the traffic signal… it can be anything from 30 seconds to… Lee told me, he once waited nearly 5 minutes, so at each intersection a laborious wait ensued for the lights to change, then an almost free-for-all to get over the junction… cab drivers and tuk-tuks vie for the spaces between lanes and it’s every man for himself… absolutely death defying, but fun nonetheless… hehehe!!!
Our journey back to the hotel, if free from traffic, would have taken no more than 15 minutes maximum, at this time we were 50 minutes into it, and whilst our journey was fascinating, Fred in the front seat was suffering… badly in need of a loo break, he threatened several times that he would have to ask the driver to pull over so he could rush into a bar, hotel or shop to relieve himself… I told him he was expecting the nigh on impossible as we were in the middle lanes and stop starting all the while… Poon assured him that we were nearly at the hotel, but on seeing a shopping centre we’d been to on Saturday, Fred realised we were not as close as he would have liked to be… and so without any notice, just opened the cab door and did a runner… Poon, myself and the cab driver, just looked on in amazement as he ran between a bus that was alongside us and melted into the hubbub on the pavement… Fred was to be seen no more!! L Our cab progressed at speed now as we passed the last “timed” intersection before our hotel and, had he waited, Fred, like us would have been ensconced back in the hotel room within 10 minutes of him making his impromptu escape from our bright pink cab…!!
Of course, I was not worried, as Fred is street savvy in almost any city situation, but Lee on returning to the hotel from work, was not best pleased… his Dad was “lost in Bangkok and in translation” lol and no matter how much I tried to tell him, all was well and he should give his Dad a little more credit, his Dad’s previous antics and those of Thai Joe Public went before him and them!!! Lee was having none of it, but knew he wouldn’t be able to find his Dad, so decided to wait for him at the front of the hotel… not more than 3-5 minutes after Lee left, Fred arrived… excited that he’d had his necessary loo break, had another beer in a 5-star plush hotel bar and took the ever present, ever dangerous tuk-tuk back to the hotel… I called Lee who must have literally passed his Dad on his way to meeting him…!! After much back slapping and name calling lol our evening shenanigans began, yet another cab ride to Khao San Road J
No comments:
Post a Comment