More Thailand travel confusion. This time: flights. In the
departure lounge: a screen that gives absolutely no information at all. When
your plane is boarding, they simply hold up a cardboard sign with your flight
number and destination on it. This is really useful if you’re sitting on the
other side of the departure lounge and the sign is being held up by someone
under 5’3 in height.
We meet three American girls who find just this as confusing
as we do. They are cramming in Phuket, Ao Nang, Chiang Mai and Bangkok into 8
days. 8 days!!! It took us about that long to get over our jet lag.
On the plane I’m sitting next to a group of Chinese girls.
Despite the fact they talk for the whole 2 hours, non- stop, I manage to have a
bit of a doze. When I wake up, as I’m looking around and shaking off sleep, I
catch the eye of one of the girls. She stops talking. Just stops dead, and
glares at me. I smile, hoping to convey, ‘I am not eaves dropping, I cannot
speak Chinese, as you were and all that.’ She simply shakes her head and resumes her
conversation. Irritatingly, when we land, the girls take their sweet old time
getting out of their seats, continuing to lean across the aisle and chat, which
means they cause a bit of a bottle neck in the seats behind them.
Our taxi driver doesn’t know where our hotel is, and has to
ask TC to use his sat-nav.
Our hotel is….weird. It’s like something out of The Shining,
but more 70s. In the lobby, there’s G-plan furniture and an old fashioned TV. I
don’t know if this look is deliberate or not. Our room is a real hodgepodge mess
of 70s design (geometrically patterned bathroom tiles, functional and hideous mock
wood furniture) 90s modern (black and sparkled bowl sink on top of a square concrete
block) 80s retro (plastic turquoise phone) The blinds are the sort you would
have seen in an office circa 1998. We THINK we know what they were trying to
do, but it’s not quite worked.
There’s an unlovely
view of other buildings, satellite dishes and TV aerials. Rather sweetly, a
couple of flowering pot plants have been placed on the roof below.
I like a hard bed, but this is like sleeping on the floor. The
pillow is so dense and springy, I feel
like I’m at the hair dressers having my hair washed. My head feels very
‘upright’ and it takes a long time to get comfortable enough to fall asleep.
We’re given free breakfast vouchers. How kind, we think.
Well…..on venturing to reception to collect our breakfasts, we are presented
with this:
If you can’t see what’s inside, there’s:
A ham sandwich
A chocolate brownie
A shortbread biscuit
Something that calls itself orange juice.
This goes in the fridge, and we head out to find some
breakfast. We find an old tea room. It’s very stylish, with old fashioned
ceiling fans and a pretty little walled garden. There’s a set breakfast menu,
of muesli, croissant and coffee. TC does not want coffee or tea and asks if he
can have water instead. The waitress looks at him like he’s said, ‘could I
please have some crack instead of coffee?’
‘NO!’ she says. ‘Madam can have your coffee if you don’t
want it, but NO water instead!’ she gathers up our menus and huffs off, looking
mortally offended.
The variations in the definition of ‘muesli’ here is
astonishing. Muesli can mean proper muesli (as you or I would have previously
experienced muesli) with chopped fresh fruit. It can mean Reddy Break. It can
mean horse feed. It can mean the crusty remains at the end of the cereal box.
Today it means a shit load of fruit with a sprinkling of oats and a vat of
natural yoghurt on the top.
Today we head out into the Old Town for a wander. It’s not
really that old, but there are some quaint buildings and quirky shops. On our
way back, we stop at a bar/ coffee shop. The owner comes to chat to us. He’s
had the bar for 9 years and doesn’t like to serve food because it ‘ruins the
smell of the coffee.’
The night market is on. It sells all kinds of things and the
food stalls smell amazing. It means it takes us three times as long to walk
back to our weird hotel, where they present us with more vouchers for tomorrow’s
weird breakfast. No thanks, I’ll take my chances on the Muesli Lottery.
