I left my room at 4PM on March 4 - my tourist visa was valid for maximum 90 days so I had booked the air ticket for 89 days and had some margin. Taxi for 500B to the little airport
My worktable with a typical Thai dinner delivered from the small restaurant by Pui.
Then to the Airport
Finally on my back street in Bangkok. - easy to find. Go Khao San Road to the Temple, then right, then left.
Lots of cheap hotels and restaurants. You can get a room for 200 Baht (no private toilet, only fan) and up.
You can see my favourite place at the tiny restaurant Popiang, "Just Enough", where I hve visited for at least half a dozen winters. An unending stream of more or less strange people are passing by, many of the exotic longtime traveling kind, who have spent years traveling around Asia with a story to tell.
This winter there seems to have been a truce between the restaurant owner and the police. It is a marked walking street, still the police has been harassing the restaurant owners who place tables on it - as the tourists want. The pies of course know well in advance, so suddenly everyone sitting outside must move inside......
Another phenomenon is, that sometimes a dry day is declared, whatever it might be, the birthday of the King or election day, and no alcohol can be served. Visible. Meaning no beer bottles visible, and you get your beer in paper mugs. Impossible for the police to see!
Blind ((?) singer (?) begging for money.
I stayed at this hotel (also when I came to Bangkok 3 months earlier) as I have done a number of times the last few years. It is ok, hardly perfect, not the cheapest at 500B, but not so far to walk for me to the restaurants, 7/11 etc. I know a number of the people there, do not know how many years I have been fairly regular there.
Now back in Sweden since 2½ months I am thinking back. I sure hope to go again, minimizing the problems caused by age and general rottenness. It is of course much of an economical problem. I doubt I go again without out my Thai wife, Yui. Her intense studies now and 2½ years more is of course what we have go to after - and the hope she gets a well-paid job after that :) Not impossible.
The last evening my friend Amp and her German bf came and we sat at the restaurant outside my place. Did I mention her in the beginning? I met those two also one of the first evenings in Bangkok. We have been friends for - maybe a decade, she married a German guy, regretted the marriage after a day but well - she was in Germany on a student visa and Germany is much more troublesome on that point that Sweden. She has separated long time ago - I met him a few times and I understand why - he looks as the gals want, he has money, he has one big interest in life when one discusses things - himself. So then Amp studied to be a nurse in Germany, found her new bf there, a German guy somewhat younger than she is - gave a very positive impression. They had planned to try life in Thailand working as nurses but found it impossible to find a decent position. Nurses there is a very low-income job, and their knowledge from the West, language etc., did not make them find anything good. So they will go back to Germany to find jobs - unfortunately now she STILL has problem with visa as she left that guy before..... So these two married in Thailand, and now she still waits for papers to come to Germany.....
While sitting at the restaurant my best Akha friend found me there..... She knows I usually sit at that other restaurant, Popiang. The Akha girls up in northern Thailand have lived there for hundreds of years, but still seldom have any citizen rights, hardly even governmental schools. So a number of them work as street sellers of handicraft in Bangkok and other places. This girl, Suan, I have known since a number of years, she sold me a handmade "hat" long time ago,
