Where am I?

What do the Thai eat for breakfast? Apparently anything they’ll eat for lunch or dinner, plus broken-rice soup. The sidewalk tom yum smells great - or we could have donuts.

After breakfast, we don’t have much of an agenda. We know we don’t want to stay around Th. Khao Sahn, so we need to look at some rooms. So we have to check out at 11am, go looking for a new place, drop our stuff, and then come back to Th. Khao Sahn to meet Shelly and Roland around midnight, after their flight arrives.

For the morning, we end up at the National Museum. A nice English lady explains the finer points of Thai cultural history and basic wat etiquette, while I sweat profusely. Did I mention that it’s hot? After 9am, it’s about 95-F and 100% humidity. It’s worse than summer in New Orleans. I keep hoping that the Thai have figured out a clever technique for natural cooling of wats and palaces, but if they ever have, that knowledge has been lost to us.

The tour ends just as we need to check out of the hotel, so we sweat back to Th. Khao Sahn and pick up our backs. Outside, I scare the jen rai out of a tuk-tuk driver. Apparently I re-opened a shaving cut on my upper lip, and a viscous mix of blood and sweat is sliding down my face. I probably look like a paler James Brown at the end of a marathon concert, but that puts the tuk-tuk driver in a bad position to bargain. He takes us to Thewet, while I find a clean tissue and mop up.

Thewet is just north of the Khao Sahn area, and has quite a few guest houses. It’s also the home of a royal wat and several government offices, plus the National Library. The Bangkok Zoo and the Dusit government buildings are right next door. But taxi and tuk-tuk drivers across Bangkok have never heard of the district. After lots of false starts, we found that “Thanon Samsen gap Thanon Si Ayuthaya” would get us to the right street-corner (probably that’s horrible Thai, and it helps if you know how to pronounce all the words).

The tuk-tuk dropped us in front of a nice-looking restaurant area on Soi Si Ayuthaya (not Thanon Si Ayuthaya). “Let’s stop for lunch, get our bearings, and then start looking for guesthouses,” I suggested. John was too jet-lagged to argue, so we sat down. When no one came by to take our order, I started looking through the Lonely Planet. “I’d like to start at Shanti - what do you think?” I looked around and saw a place called “Sawasdee”, across the alley. I looked across the street and saw a few food vendors, a hairdresser, and a 7-Eleven. Then I looked up, and saw where we were sitting: Shanti.

“Hey John, let’s just try to get a room here.”

“What about Shanti?”

I’m off to Thailand. But what am I doing with a four-stop itinerary? One that leaves SFO at o’dark-thirty? One that arrives at 20:30? Short answer: miles.

This trip is burning gobs of UA miles, for a first-class seat over the Pacific. But it was hard to find a first-class seat for SFO-NRT-BKK, or even SFO-LAX-BKK, so I ended up with the SEA routing.

The trip to SEA and beyond is uneventful. The SEA leg is a domestic 757, so my seat is really a business seat, but it’s a short flight. The NRT flight is a 777, and seat 3J has a lie-flat powered bed. It’s quiet, and there’s a good view of the Pacific, but I took melatonin in SEA, so I’m more interested in the bed. The food is pretty good, and there is a Japanese option - something like a bento box. The wine is disappointing, though: borderline Champagne, and all the reds are made from Bordeaux grapes. I was hoping for something fancy in a Pinot Noir, but at least there’s a decent French Chablis.

This is my first time in Japan, sitting in Narita until the NRT-BKK flight boards. It’ll be on Thai, which should be interesting. Thai doesn’t have a first-class lounge in NRT, so I’m in a ghostly-empty ANA lounge (my flight is a code-share for ANA). It’s delayed twice, for an hour each time. The ANA lounge has some red Burgundy, lots of idle staff, and some scary-looking toilets.

My flight on Thai is scary too, but for a good reason. The seats are a bit older and less high-tech than UA equipment, but they recline farther and take up a lot more cabin space. There are 18 first-class seats on the plane, and only five are occupied. There are at least three cabin staff: by the end of the five-hour flight, each of them has come by to thank me for flying and ask about my travel plans. The business-class purser offers some advice, too. “Watch out in Krabi - very big mosquitoes”.

Sadly, the wine is plonk. I try a Gewürztraminer (from Alsace), but it displays all the crispness and refreshing mouth-feel of a boiled slug. It might be better chilled, but the wine itself is probably cooked. The food is great, though. There’s a pork curry with plenty of chilis in it, and the condiments included extra chilis in an easily-pocketed bottle. That will come in handy on future UA flights.

At the arrival gate, no one is allowed to exit until we five first-class passengers gather our chattels and receive the wais of the cabin staff. We are escorted to a waiting fleet of electric carts. These speed us through the huge new terminal to our own dedicated customs agent, who whisks us through with a smile and another wai. I could get used to this.

I’m in Thailand.

Well, I’m in BKK. It’s only 20:30, and John’s flight doesn’t arrive until 11:30. Despite the first-class flights, I’m tired. I get some cash from an ATM. I get some water, and a coke. John is delayed half an hour.

Finally we manage to meet up, get a taxi, and go to the hotel near Thanon Khao Sahn. The neighborhood reminds me of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and I wonder if we’ll sleep. But it’s past midnight - we can look for a better place tomorrow.

I’m in NYC, teaching a developer course. There’s a little bit of snow on the ground, and everyone wants me to drink stout.

I’m not going to complain much about the exchange rate. It’s true that restaurant meals were expensive, but beer wasn’t such a bad deal. In London, less than $6 gets you 20-oz of cask-conditioned ale. In Manhattan or San Francisco, $4-$5 gets you 16-oz of questionable keg beer, and the barman expects a tip. I also find the English attitude toward alcohol quite refreshing.

Their attitude toward conservation, however, sometimes appalls me.

There isn’t a lot to say about my last couple of days in London. I went to some very nice pubs, but all the LondonLand pubs get plenty of business without my advertising.

I did get to the new British Library, near St Pancras station. The architecture is nice, and the exhibit on London maps was stunning.

With training over (job well done, guys!), I decided to get out of London for a night. According to the BBC, this Saturday night was the peak for holiday parties, and I wanted to be elsewhere. Hmm… someplace close to London, interesting to visit for a day, and as yet unvisited by me? Ah, isn’t Canterbury a World Heritage Site? I’m collecting those - everyone needs a hobby.

So I found a web site for the Miller’s Arms, a Shepard-Neame gastropub in the old city center. Their rooms are named after Chaucer’s tales, and I booked into the Pardoner’s Tale. Saturday morning, the 11am train took me from Charing Cross to Canterbury West, arriving some time after noon. It’s a fine-looking old cathedral town, with views of the cathedral towers around every corner.

The Miller’s Arms turned out to be a nice little place, with several seating areas and a long, L-shaped bar. The Shepard-Neame beers are some of my favorites, so I was pleased to stay there. For some reason they put me into the Wife of Bath, rather than the room I’d booked, but I think I got the better of that deal. My room was spacious, by English standards, with a modern bathroom and a view of the cathedral towers. I also gave thanks that I wasn’t arriving on 31 December.

I dropped off my bags and went exploring. Once I got my bearings, I quickly realized that Canterbury has been thoroughly re-purposed as a tourist destination. The Cathedral actually charges for admission, and the old city center is entirely surrounded by parking lots (also for pay). The cars look like an invading army laying siege to the old walls.

Since it was winter, most of the tourists were Europeans - and mostly Catholic? I don’t know. And despite the tourism, it’s well worth visiting. I walked around inside the old walls, and stopped at a number of interesting pubs. It’s great to drink in a genuinely old pub: London doesn’t have many, and nothing as old as (say) Simple Simon, which claims to be 14th century.

The Cathedral looked even better at night, I thought.

Canterbury has been occupied since pre-Roman times (it means something like “fortress of the Kentish”), and it continues to develop. This results in a lot of mixed construction - bits of Roman masonry in a modern brick wall, for example. And there are other, stranger contrasts.

I went to Simple Simon’s again, in the evening, for a plate of fish and chips and some live jazz. They were both good, and so were the pints of Incubus.