Bangkok Friday 13 - Monday 16th May 2011

We stayed at the Shanti lodge while we were in Bangkok. This is an old favourite of ours. We stayed here three times before this and we wanted to stay again to seep up that air of adventure which we first felt when we reached Thailand back in 2007 for our first trip to Asia.
The truth is that you can never go home, you just keep moving forward and the past is an unreachable country. So, the Shanti lodge was not as we remembered it!
We were feeling a bit low at this time. All the stresses of moving country and the strains of dealing with our ex-landlord dispute was wearing us down. We were tired, grumpy and not in full holiday mode. Going on holidays between a move like this has its ups and downs. On the up side, its a lot cheaper, you can use your flight home as a way to get a free holiday flight. The holiday flight is the flight you would be taking anyway. In our case, the total flights home cost us 1150 which is less than the 1850 we would have had to pay to go all the way home from Australia with one airline. Secondly, since you are not paying accommodation while you are away, you save about 800 each per month! But the drawback is the frame of mind. You have one foot in the old world of old stresses and chaos, one foot in the new world
of future worries and an eagerness to start anew and yet you are stuck in some hiatus world of holiday.
Our mood disintegrated when we reached the Shanti. Constant travel and landlord issues had paid a heavy toll. We needed a warm bed and friendly therapist. We found shouting, angry hoteliers and a rock hard bed in a hostel.
The shanty brings out a mixture of feelings in me. At once, I hate it and love it at the same time. It shouts Thailand at me, it reminds me of adventure but the people who work there are always angry and gruff and the rooms are quite sparse and noisy.
We got bitten by mosquitos, children ran up and down the stairs shouting while we tried to sleep and one nasty woman mocked me after I tried to say Cap-com-ca or thank you to her in Thai. But, the restaurant is amazing, the food is all home made, msg free and organic, the place is covered in lovely plants and trees and decorated with little tiles and mirrors. It's as much of an enigma as Bangkok itself, a city I both love and hate with equal passion.
The staff at the Shanti lodge are not representative of Thai people at all. They are the exception. Most people seem really nice and friendly and extremely polite. I am not sure how genuine that is, having once worked in a tourist shop back in Dublin, I know the fake smiles that tourists evoke, but I believe that most of their smiling, laid back attitude is genuine and that Thai people are, all in all, very friendly.
We did the tourist thing and headed for the Kho san road, the backpacker mecca where everything is sold from fake ids to shirts to foot massages. I got a dress made for my friends upcoming wedding, we had a beer in a corner pub and ate our dinner back in the shanti, washing it down with sangria.
I was feeling very sick with Asthma because of the smog, so the next few days are a blur really. I also had a bad cold which contributed to my breathing problems. We went for a fish spa, which was really weird but awesome. The fish are called doctor fish, they eat dead skin from your feet. You basically put your feet in a tank with a load of little fish who swarm in on you. On Saturday night we went out for beers, got drunk on chang beer and the last day was a fairly quiet day of being hung over, reading Asimov's 'The rest of the robots' and drinking Thai soup.
I love the food in Thailand, it's always a delight. Thai food is probably my favourite over all. It's so tasty and there is such a wide variety of different dishes, the spices used vary and are never too overpowering. We had an early night on Sunday, as our monday train was at 5.55. Bangkok came and went like some strange neon blur and we were up at 4.30 Monday morning for our trip to the train station. The 5.50 train to the Cambodian border awaited.