The first stop after the hotel was a massage.  Just a simple, traditional, 60-minute Thai massage at our local massage parlour over on Sukhumvit Soi 23.  Not a fancy place, to be sure.  But the people are friendly and the massages are inexpensive. 

Once Brad and Silvia called to say they were unpacked and refreshed, I walked over to the Bangkok Botique Hotel, five minutes up the street from us.  Arriving, I took a seat in the lobby to wait for them and the busboy, recognizing me from earlier in the afternoon, told the front desk that they should ring room 210 for me.  Overhearing him, I told him in Thai that I had called them already.

So this piqued his interest and he started talking with me in Thai, calling over the three ladies at the front desk so they could see this farang attempt some Thai.  I was doing well until he asked how long I had been in Thailand, to which I mispronounced my answer and said that I had been here “about eight round objects,” substituting the word duang (classified for stamps and round objects like planets) for deuan (months).  They thought that was very humourous.

Brad, Silvia and I walked back to the apartment and visited for a few minutes while Tawn got ready to go.  Then we walked a few blocks in the other direction over to the massage parlour.  Having stopped by the evening before to alert them to our arrival, a staff of extra masseuses were on duty.  Brad, Silvia and Tawn opted for the Thai-style body massage while I went for the leg and foot massage, my “usual.”

For the hour that I was being massaged, I didn’t hear any screams of pain coming from upstairs so I took that as a good sign.  Meanwhile, I practiced my Thai a bit more with the masseuses downstairs – they were teasing one guy who had spilled his dish of massage lotion, then they teased me because I kept glancing at the clock on the wall which I figured out eventually was broken.  Then the owner’s chihuahua came over to play with me for a while, sitting on my lap and nipping at me with razor-sharp teeth.  Finally, he callmed down and just laid his head on my arm and zoned out.

When Brad and Silvia came downstairs an hour later, they were completely relaxed and I could tell immediately that we had converted another two people to the laid-back Thai lifestyle!  They’ve decided they want to do massages every day.

After the massage we drove to Harmonique, a Thai restaurant located in and outside of a century-old shop house in the older part of the city.  Surrounded by kitschy Chinese and Thai antiques, the food is very good albeit westernized. 

Service was less attentive than it used to be: the waiter was a bit brusque (unusual for Thais) and our request for a second bottle of water later in the dinner went unfilled even though we asked twice. 

All in all, I think it is a nice place to take visitors on their first night.  Kind of like entering Thai cuisine on the shallow end of the pool!  We’ll go for full-fledged Thai style dining today.

Afterwards we drove into the old city, went down to the river and saw Wat Arun lit by floodlights on the western bank of the Chao Praya River.