Bangkok trip

It's been some time since I managed to post anything, one reason (along with preoccupation with other matters, sheer laziness, etc.) being that I was away last weekend. My wife had a meeting to attend in Bangkok, and I decided to go along. What's more, we took our daughter, who thereby had a number of firsts, including her first international trip (for that matter, her first trip out of the Taipei area) and her first airplane ride. It was a pretty short trip, probably the shortest of my many trips to Thailand, as we went on Friday and came back the following Tuesday. Not surprisingly, we didn't do much sightseeing (in fact we didn't do any, at least in the sense of going to specific tourist sights), though that wasn't a big deal, as most of the major sights of Bangkok we've seen at least once and in some cases multiple times.

The meetings my wife was attending went on all day Saturday and Sunday, and I stayed in the area of the hotel they were being held in -- the same one we were staying at -- so she could nurse the baby during their breaks. My furthest venture was to a used bookstore about 20 minutes walk away, a little way past Soi 26 on Thanon Sukhumvit (the hotel was on Soi 20). I took the baby in her stroller, which was complicated by the fact that at most intersections with sois (a soi is a lane or alley off a larger road) or driveways there was no ramp down from the sidewalk to the street, so if the curb was high, as it usually was, I had to pick up the stroller to haul it down and sometimes back up again (though when going back up it was usually possible to just push down on the back to lift the front wheels onto the curb). Also, I had to try to make sure the baby didn't get too much sun (not that a little sun is bad for anyone, but at her age she would certainly burn easily). Nevertheless, a trip of this distance proved manageable, though unfortunately, despite having a good selection, this time the bookstore only had one of the books I was looking for (on our last trip I was able to find several I was searching for there).

Much of the rest of the time we were in the hotel or at most in the soi outside. Fortunately the meeting was being held on a floor just two below the one we were staying on (though annoyingly the stairs were for emergency use only, so we had to use the elevator), and that floor (the 14th) also had the hotel's pool, which was outside on the roof of a shorter wing of the hotel. Though we didn't get to go swimming, it was nice to be able to sit outside while we were waiting for the next rest break in the meeting or while the baby was nursing. The baby was not surprisingly something of hit among many attendees of the meeting, who incidentally were human rights defenders from a wide variety of places, including Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, various South Asian countries and Mongolia.

On the last day the three of us first moved to a cheaper hotel across the soi from the one the meeting was held in (our stay in the latter was partly subsidized only through Sunday, the night following the meeting, so we decided to save some money by switching to a cheaper place). After that we took the Skytrain (the elevated rail line -- incidentally saturated with annoying advertisements; the underground subway called the MRT is much better in this regard, though it didn't go where we were headed in this case) to the shopping district of central Bangkok. We went to the chaotic but relatively cheap MBK shopping center before heading over to the Siam Center/Discovery Center/Siam Paragon shopping complex. Though unsurprisingly I didn't find many of the Thai CDs I was looking, most being either obscure, very old, out of print, or some combination of the three, I did manage to get a few things, and my wife also found a few interesting things. For dinner we met a woman I knew from previous trips who works at Thailand's largest record company GMM Grammy as a sort of assistant to the boss. The place she chose was a pretty good Italian restaurant (she suggested it after I said I'd like to have Italian food) not far from the GMM Grammy building, and fortunately also not far from our hotel (in the other direction), which meant we could walk back.

The other two days of the trip were pretty much taken up by our flights there and back, which fortunately the baby handled fairly well, with only a little fussing. We can only hope her next international trip goes at least nearly as well.