Istanbul - Bangkok - BanMo

2011.06.11

It is  tough life, to travel, and one is always happy, at my age, when it is over and one can sit down and relax for a while. I could not imagine taking 1-2 week holidays and run around like a rat all the time. Also the time from 1999 onwards when I spent just about all holidays on a long winter holiday in Thailand, so I could stay for a while - over a certain age, was it 45? - I had 7 weeks of holidays a year.

Last story ended at a table in the big eating place of Istanbul Airport, the usual, chairs and tables in the middle and then small restaurants along the walls where you pick up your food.

We had 6-7 hours of waiting, so first there for a while, where I wrote the last entry, then we walked a bit - they had something called Free Public Internet but it did not work so I only wrote that offline, still no gate number coming up so we walked back as Yui was hungry again - after all she is a Thai girl. They eat five times a day and very rarely get fat. I had already walked more than any day for years, once the gate number was shown we started to walk in that directory, but after a while I had cold sweat all over and Yui said I looked pretty gray, so sat down and she used her best Turkish  to run around looking for a guy with a wheel chair. And then good service - which I even got in Pakistan once, as soon as I came to the waiting room tvo guys with one wheel chair came running seeing me walking with my crutch, and then they were around for hours until time for my plane to go, and then me and chair was driven down to the gate, was met by the food elevator delivering food to the planes, and they put me on that one, and delivered me to the food door of the plane..... Perfect service!

Here in Istanbul it was something similar, they transported me with the "ambulance" where they drove on the wheel chair, also kind of an experience to Yui, hope she got some nice photos.......   And then that machine drove to the plane and also lifted me up to the door of the plane. Elegant.

We travelled Turkish all the way and it is OK. Food ok, only problem that the beer was warm, but I had experienced that on the trip from CPH to IST so to BKK I was satisfied with Turkish muslim red wine. Was OK. Food OK, thou if I survive this trip, next time I should try Qatar. Turkish is of course better classed than dirty old SAS but Qatar is pretty close to top mark where they compare air companies while SAS and Turkish are somewhere in the middle. I would not try the bottom ones like Sudan Airways - also called "in shallah airways", "god willing airways"!.Or  Bangladesh Biman. You can do it and then blog about it.

We came to civilised hot Bangkok, a wheel chair was already waiting, and then I sat in that from the plane to the luggage line to the toilet to the exchange office to the taxi line outside. Convenient, try it one day!

Somehow I do feel quite at home in BKK, even thou my body is dying around me. It is not ME, after all.  It is a convenient enclosure of ME.

So taxi for half an hour in a half circle around BKK, mostly via paid toll roads circulating town, to a supermarket complex in the northern end, where Yui's brother waited with his pickup truck and his son and their mother. Hugs and then to a supermarket near Saraburi, where we stopped for - eating of course. We are in Thailand after all, thou this was a Chinese restaurant where you prepare your own food you are set around a table with a boiling pot with soup, and in it you put lots of things yourself, vegetables, finely sliced meat, tofu, whatever, and ice tea to drink. No beer before 17:00.  So 900B all in all for 5 people.

Then bought Aircard, for internet, looked like an over-sized USB memory stick, works allright, 7Mbits or so. So I use that now here in the village, some 150 kms north of Bangkok. We also bought SIM cards for our Thai mobile phones, and some phones - I had two along, one for the Swedish and one for the Thai SIM card, but Yui needed a second one, and she also bought one for her brother who had a VERY old one.

Then we stopped at a small place along the highway selling furniture and Yui bought a sturdy working table for this room, 1200B.

Now 3 gals, all Thai, are in this little room, and the son of Yui's brother. Aircon only here which lowered the temperature from 33° to 29°. I do not want it colder. I am impolite enough to type, not listen to inkomprehensible Thai and smile like a buddha. But at my age.....  The other gals, friends of Yui, were young and pretty when I was here 5 years, still pretty and with one kid each - same system as in Sweden 100 years ago when the gals enjoyed both making and having kids, and both mothers and kids look very happy here in the jungle, like old Sweden I guess. One wonders what will be in 100 years when the average age in Europe is 60, and the kids have got tired of using all the money feeding the oldies, so they have moved to more civilized places. No such problems here! Here they still enjoy it, after all the girls are prettier.

Yui's mother, in a way she looks more fresh than 5 years ago. Then she walked with a stick now not, she has had a hip operation in a cheap hospital in Bangkok and now she is without stick and for sure walks better than I do - she is a year or so younger than me.

I am fed all the time, good food but too much! They know I love Chang beer so when I arrived here I got one, and a big plate of Yui's mother's pig feet soup, delicious, but after all I had just eaten at that Chinese restaurant and was already quite filled up. They had probably intended to eat more later, but I was tired enough to land on my air-conditioned bed and stay until morning. Except up peeing a few times - in Sweden I might go up once or twice a night when I have a mug or two of my homemade red wine before, but here no wine and only one beer so had to run, and find the slippery way out to the toilet behind the kitchen, Yui's mother is doing what she can to make us stay more than a week, and has filled the fridge with Chang :) It means Elephant, so Thai Elephant beer - you can buy it in Systemet in Sweden but not at all the same taste, slightly weaker and no heavy metals.
 
I stopped being polite at 50, had not earned any points on it before.

So we are gonna be here for a week, then either to BKK for a week or straight to Cha-Am, they better decide soon so I can book hotel in Cha-Am. I am here as at home, eat slowly with food beside the computer, only that the plates pile up - Yui's mother is a very good cook but I can not eat faster for that, then it gets stuck half way. I always had that problem, but it is healthy to eat slowly yah.