Return to Bangkok

By Mark

We arrived back in Bangkok and made a stop at a location called Gems International Gallery – a slightly strange, tourist trap.

They shuttle guests back and forth from hotels and once you have sat through a bad B movie of introduction to gems you are surrounded by a herd of women in little black dresses, escorted through a gem processing workroom and then directed to the jewelry of your choice. The first men’s ring with a ruby we were shown was $10,000.00 US

PASS! We bought a small hand-painted porcelain covered bowl.

We returned to the Aetas Lumpini Hotel, checked in, grabbed a quick (and quite comical) dinner at the Chinese restaurant next door. Dinner was comical because seven of us went to dinner, the menu was in Thai, Chinese, and English and no one in the restaurant seemed to speak much English. It took about six servers to wait on us, food came at random times and some made it to the table after multiple only after lots of pointing and begging.

We headed out for a trip to one of the night markets. Our flight home was 5:55 am the next morning with our hotel transfer picking us up at just before 3:00 am so we thought to stay up all night and sleeping on the plane was a great idea.