Travelogue

Suvarnabhumi Night MarketToday we began the first leg of our long journey home. We flew from Phuket back to Bangkok and took a taxi to the Golden Jade, a hotel in Suvarnabhumi, close to the airport, and I guess you could call it a “suburb” of Bangkok.

The hotel wasn’t great, and the neighborhood around it wasn’t very appealing either, so we had no great expectations for our last day in Thailand. However, we did have to eat, so we looked on Tripadvisor and found that there were several choices just a little over a half mile west on Lat Kabrang Road.

While we couldn’t find the restaurant we were originally searching for (I think it had closed), we did find a very pleasant outdoor night market with upscale stores and restaurants, as well as numerous food vendors selling very affordable and delicious looking food.

Last item on Lolo's bucket listBy this point, I had an extreme craving for two things: non-Thai food (not that it isn’t wonderful, but I did miss home) and wine (no more Chang beer please). That made our choice for dinner quite obvious - Scoozi Pizza, a pretty fancy looking (white tablecloths Italian restaurant that served wine. I was pretty excited. It was relatively empty, because we were really between meals, as it was only 4:00 pm, but the pizza was quite good and the wine (which could probably have been any form of grape by this time) was exquisite.

While eating, we happened to glance out the window at the wine store next door, to which we were close enough to see the prices of bottles on their shelves. I looked for something familiar and spotted a bottle of Kendall Jackson chardonnay with a price tag of 2500 bahts, which is the equivalent to about $80. Now, I am far from a wine snob, despite living in Sonoma Valley, but our house wine is Kendall Jackson chardonnay, and I buy it at Safeway (after discount) for $8.99. No wonder we hadn’t been drinking wine in Thailand. It is exorbitantly expensive!

Herb enjoyinga beer at the Suvarnabhumi Night MarketAfter our early dinner, we strolled around the market and observed it getting more and more crowded as the dinner hour approached - not with tourists, but with people from local neighborhoods, stopping by to eat or pick up dinner to bring home. This was the closest I had gotten to feeling a similarity to home - a suburban community going, coming home from work, and going out for some socialization and a bite to eat. I could picture this being somewhere in a U.S. city.

Making that feeling of home even stronger, the music being played was classic rock from the 80s. Herb and I sat out an outdoor bar, had a drink, and people watched. I left briefly to try something that was still left on my Thailand bucket list - drinking straight from a coconut. I was so excited, but soon found out that warm coconut milk is overrated - at least for me. I should have chosen one of the cold coconut smoothies.

It was a much better airport hotel experience than we had anticipated. Every experience in Thailand up to this point had felt so unique and exotic, but there was a certain familiarity in this market that gave us a jump start on our transition back home.