Easing out of India

Officially, I haven't been in India for two days now. Unofficially, my head is still there a little bit. I've been taking it easy in Bangkok and not really doing a whole lot. I arrived at my host Sam's house yesterday around 9:30am or so. We chatted for a bit and I checked email while he went to the gym. When he got back, we went out for lunch and then he dropped me off at a spa for a foot massage and pedicure so he could get a few hours of work in.

After an hour of some much needed foot pampering, I went back to the house for a nap (also much needed since I'd only gotten about two hours of sleep the night before on the plane). A friend of Sam's and a fellow CSer, Ganesh, and his girlfriend Kate invited us over for a traditional Thai dinner. When Sam and I arrived, it smelled delicious and the food was set out and ready to be eaten. Although I didn't think I was hungry, the smells got my appetite going pretty quickly. :-) There was rice, mushroom soup, fish balls, a spicy chicken dish, vegetables in a brown sauce, dried shrimp, and my first truly weird food in a long time - gaeng tai pla. Gaeng tai pla is a kind of paste made from the innards of a fish mixed with salt and other spices and fermented. As far as I could tell, it's just served alongside other foods and isn't a main dish. Kate, who is Thai, hates the stuff and would violently turn her head away when Ganesh jokingly thrust the stuff in front of her face, so I was a bit nervous about trying it. The verdict? Not bad, actually. Oddly enough, it didn't taste particularly fishy and the weirdest thing about it was the texture more than anything else.

A few hours of eating and merry-making later, I was exhausted, so Sam and I headed back to his house and I promptly fell asleep. I didn't really have a plan for today, so I just started wandering, still trying to get used to the idea that I'M IN BANGKOK! Tomorrow I think I'll get up early, head to a market, and then check out Old Bangkok and maybe a temple or two.

By the way, my Thai visa is good until 8 Feb, so I'll be here until then. From there I'll move on to Laos, Vietnam, China (did I mention yet that that was added to my itinerary?), and Cambodia before coming back to Thailand for a couple of weeks of beach time.