Goodbye Thailand

My last few days in Thailand were really great. It turns out that I was supposed to spend one less day there than I thought and was a little late for my flight, but I'll get to that story in a minute. In this post I'll talk about visiting the Jim Thompson House, the story of my travel back, and some thoughts.

My last full day in Thailand, Eve and I decided to visit a place called the Jim Thompson House. It was built by an American architect with that name who vacationed in Thailand while with the military, and then decided to move there. He was so taken with the Thai silk that he had the idea to ship some back home and ended up building a vast fortune. He then used this fortune to build the complex which is about 8 small traditional Thai houses with an absolutely breathtaking collection of statues, paintings, furniture, and well pretty much everything associated with luxury. The tour is very enthralling to see all of this stuff and hear Jim Thompson's story. Only a fraction of the complex allows photography, so I'll get to that.

One of the houses in the complex

This is a Buddha statue from the 7th century. The arm broke off some time ago, but it used to be raised to mean "stop fighting"

Eve in front of some ceramic wall covering

a purdy flower

Me with Eve's fan in the restaurant

Jim Thompson was a man very interested in horoscopes. He had one which told him that he needed to be very careful during his 61st year. When he turned 61, he took a vacation to Malaysia and was never heard from again. That is just part of the Jim Thompson lore, I definitely recommend visiting this place if you are in Bangkok.

Well, I'll get to the exciting part now. My flight was at 7:10 in the morning on Tuesday, so I had thought. I got up that day and checked my flight itinerary, and much to my surprise, the flight had been the day before. That's right, I missed my international flight by a day. This is the kind of moment where your heart stops and your life flashes before your eyes. My biggest concern was that I had to teach the next morning. Luckily, I had Eve with me. We got a cab, and Eve told him to take the express way and step on it. This was fun, the cab cruised to the airport at 140 km/hr while Eve gently slept on my shoulder.

We got to the airport, and unfortunately, none of the customer service stands were open for the airlines. We had breakfast while the sun rose. Finally the counter for Japan Air opened at 6:30 and I asked them about getting a flight. They didn't have anything direct to Seoul so I would have had to book two flights with them. I checked at the Thai airways counter, my airline, which opened at 6:45, and it actually turned out to be no problem at all to get me on another flight. They put me on a flight leaving at 10 in the morning getting to Incheon at about 8:45, no extra charge, no hassle.

The terminals at the Bangkok airport were shaped like the inside of a giant airplane wing

The rest of the travel from there is kind of a blur. I made it to Incheon fine, but the last bus to Seosan left at 6:30 that evening, so I caught a bus to Seoul. I got to Seoul at about 9:45, and it turned out the last bus left at 9:15, and I would have to wait until 6 the next morning. With this time to kill, I spent about three hours in a PC room, about an hour in a Burger King, and then I went to the bus station to sit and wait.

I did get a few hours of sleep at the bus station, and some on the bus, but my combined sleep for those two nights was about 6 hours. I arrived in Seosan at 7:40 with my first class being at 9:40. I was fine teaching in the morning but later in the afternoon I was super drowsy. I would be reading to the students out of a text book and nod off in between sentences. They made fun of me but I got over it. As for recovery from this I slept from 8pm to 8am that night.

Overall, I can pretty safely say that this trip to Bangkok was my favorite vacation I've been on. Meeting Eve was the best part. When we met there was this instant connection and we spent pretty much all of our time together when she wasn't working. She works at a traditional Thai dancing theater, called the Siam Niramit show. I didn't get a chance to see it but it looks pretty good. Leaving her was tough, but I'm going to try to bring her to Korea for a while.

A cutout at the movie theater at MBK

Some tasteful graffiti in Bangkok

This last photo is a good image for how I view Bangkok. I feel like this city is like New York City but on crack. NYC at least has some square streets and all the taxis have meters, but Bangkok is all just so unpredictable. In a way I think that Bangkok is just an airport and a temple surrounded by gift shops. So much of this city just depends on the tourists for their money and so many of them just want to scam tourists that it makes it very hard to trust anybody, but very easy to buy a whole bunch of souvenirs.

I did get to try two new forms of transportation. One, I rode in a tuk-tuk, which was super fun. I also rode on the back of small motorbike with a total of three people on it. That wasn't my favorite experience ever, but it was quick and cheap. I might have peed myself a little.

It was this vacation that I started to really feel like a world traveler. I realized this when I looked in my wallet and had currency from three different nations, and none of them were the USA. For the record one of the bills was from Rwanda, and it doesn't really make sense to still have that in my wallet.

Good trip though, good trip.