Day Three
22nd March

Alex got up at 600 AM. We hung out in the bedroom while she played. On Satellite we found some Disney channels, and played some shows for her while she plays. Once we had breakfast, we packed up for Pranburi, our van to show at 10 AM. We are paying a man to drive us down. They say its 200 or so kilometers, its around a 3 hour drive. Kim can’t go, she has college courses. Snow Alex and I go with her mother and Kung. Traffic is slow getting out of the city. We see the marshes where they make salt. We stop at a rest stop, and buy coffee for Snow, Lay’s chips, water for me to put Lipton Tea-To-Go in.
We have lunch in a town a half hour from Pranburi called Hua Hin, which is an older more established beach resort town. They have beaches and resorts and high rises reaching up to the Gulf of Thailand. The Gulf is like the Gulf of Mexico but smaller. The water is warm. Upper 70s to 80 or so. And the waves are smaller than the ocean. We are taken by our driver to restaurant on the beach, where we ate on a covered patio, at the sand’s edge. The food was outstanding. Great squid and fish in a soup broth. After she finished eating, Alex ran around on the sand with Snow, then with me. She saw a couple of horses that are hired out for rides on the sand. There were a few dogs too. She had a great time, and the wind was blowing. She had her white hat, and she actually kept it on
After playing on the sand for nearly an hour, we drove the rest of the way to our resort, Tuangsook Lake Hills Resort.

Our hotel is very pretty, the rooms for the most part are very nice. But it is in a rural areas, there’s not much close by, but there are nice vistas for the surrounding hills. Its very peaceful this small two lane road winds in front of it. There wasn t any internet connection the first day. The TV has 6 channels--5 in Thai, and 1 in Belgium Flemish. I cant believe it. Where did that come from? I haven’t seen it before, and to see it in Thailand is a bit stunning. Snow said she heard Alex say “ bottle. “

Day Two
21st March

Alex wakes up at 430 AM in the morning.

Snow and I are up at 430 AM. She is loud. She is up and ready to play and go downstairs. Maybe it was the 3 and half hour nap earlier in the day or that she was asleep by 930 PM. Or the heat maybe. Its around 95 Thursday but its always very humid too. Snow and I take her downstairs. We play downstairs, no one else is up but Numphu who is leaving for work at 5 AM. We have a little cinnamon roll. I watch the first round of the golf tournament from Doral, but it’s the end of the coverage from golf channel and its pouring out. We go back upstairs before 6 am and Alex and Snow and I get to sleep till 8 or so.

We set out for a mall after breakfast. Its called Platinum, located in urban Bangkok among the hotels and shopping centers, a neighborhood called Pratenum. So perhaps the mall is a play on words of the neighborhood name. the Mall is 6 stories tall, and there are escalators. One floor is all food court, they have like 50 windows, all a slightly different kind of food, Japanese here, Indian there, diff Thai foods. Some with rice some with noodles, some with soup, some with curry. You buy a money card and charge it down with each order. I get some Indian food, nan (their bread) some tandoori chicken (it’s a red-orange shade from the spices), some rice, some sauce. Snow’s mom, Kung and Kim are in tow and get a noodle soup, I think its spicy. Alex eats a lil from all of us, loves to get down and wander around the table looking at everyone else of course.

This mall has very tiny shops like something you see at a swap meet, and the aisles between them is very narrow, like only two people can walk side by side. If someone stops to look it means we have to go around trying not to run into someone coming at you from the other way. The shops are like walk-in closet size and only 4 or 5 or 6 can be in any one shop at the same time. Alex is all about taking the escalator, while we are on floor 2, she is staring at the escalators in the center of the floor saying “up, up, up” as I carry her. She points at the escalators. So while Snow and family are close in view to them, I take her up and down a floor. Ride up, Ride down. Sometimes she gets off the escalator on her own while holding our hand.

After lunch we are off to head home, its around 345 pm already. Alex is tired, We got some stuff for snow and they each got something. Cept me. The taxi ride back takes a long time, the traffic in Bangkok now considered by Time the worst in the world, much uglier than LA even worse than Boston and Atlanta and they are supposed to be bad. A road is closed, that we need to take home, so we are forced onto the highway. You pay 40 baht toll, about $1.20. There are 3 lanes, but the Thai drivers drive four cars wide, essentially driving on the shoulder. No one cares about it in Bangkok. After our trip, Alex ran around the yard with Numphu’s three kids, the nannies, Snow and I, and Kim and Kung. it’s a huge yard and there’s a sandbox, swings, a slide, teeter totter, and lots of grass to run around. She had so much fun and her only problem was the slide doesn’t let you slide fast, its so slow you almost have to push yourself down, the plastic was worn down. She was eager to interact with the other children. Sadly, the children see the nannies much more than the parents who both work a lot. Their father will be home much more after the surgery. He needs six months of rehabilitation and therapy.

Around six in the evening, in the dusk, we decide to head out to another mall to get some hair gel that I didn’t pack, a phone card to call home, perhaps a cell phone to use for the trip, perhaps a pair of new glasses and some backup contact lenses. Snow and I debate whether to leave Alex at the house to nap, or will she get upset if we leave without her and she won’t sleep at all. She never napped in the afternoon. We could leave her with Kim and Kung, and she gets along well with Kim. In the end, we brought her along, with Kim and Kung too. The five of us in a taxi heading for the mall, this time the Mall Bang-Ka-Pi. Then by 730 PM she fell asleep, while in the mall with us. We had to carry her around with us till we could get back. We needed to eat dinner, so we went to a Nisson Ramen place with large booths and we could put her down to sleep while we all had soup teriyaki and California rolls.

We spent the evening in the room, since Kriang was returning home from the hospital and they set up a bed in the family room. I found a channel that airs Survivor on Friday nights. So I tuned in, and it was the most current episode from this week.

20th March,

We arrived at midnight. The flight was relatively smooth. Not bad on turbulence. Oh once in a while we surfed from side to side, Snow said she nearly got sick on that maneuver.

Our biggest concern before we left was Alex’s first flight. I was nervous how she would react to take-offs, landings and high altitude. She was fantastic. She never got sick, never got seriously nauseous. She just blithely played with her toys and flirted with a young 20 something Chinese man. I sat next to him early in the flight and she kept peering at him from the safety of my knee with her flirtatious smile. At one point, he disappeared for a while and we had the whole row We enjoyed that, but he did return.

We had changed our seats at the ticket counter and we had three at the bulkhead, facing a wall partition. An older gentleman from England had the seat next to us, contrarian to the ticket counter woman’s plan for us. But he volunteered to move after the flight attendants, who fell in love with Alex almost immediately looked for open seats at the boarding’s end. They found him a great seat further up. He almost didn’t go, because he started to grow too fond of a very cute young Thai mother and her pretty daughter. But then he got it that the lil girl wouldn’t have any room to sleep later on and we was cheerful to make the move, Whew, he made Snow and I nervous there for a moment.

After his departure, We had lots of legroom and this was Alex’s dominion for playing and walking around. She also loved to stand on the seat and look over the seat tops and glance back at other passengers. The TV had Disney movies and Lilo and Stitch, but she paid them no mind. She doesn’t have the patience to wear airline headphones. She slept the longest by far, I think around eight hours during the second half of the flight. She only woke up before we landed was due to a bossy Chinese flight attendant telling us we had to put Alex in Snow’s lap, She was sound asleep through the entire descent into Hong Kong.

The food was OK, oily as usual. I was surprised to get a Nestles Chocolate ice cream bar for a dessert on the Bangkok flight. It was so hardened from the freeze that you had to bite off your ice cream like a hard piece of chocolate. The Hong Kong flight had a lovely marbled cheesecake too. Snow still thinks they make better food over at Eva Air. I was able to watch three movies: No Country For Old Men, Enchanted, and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Snow joined in on Enchanted. She also played some Bejeweled on the screen. They have these remote controls and you can pause or rewind the movie, or play a computer game.
I slept three hours on the first flight and maybe an hour, or 90 minutes on the second flight, but. And I slept in the Hong Kong Airport on three chairs for an hour and a half.

We were met at baggage claim by Numphu Snow’s cousin. She works at the airport. She hugged Alex right away, a taste of things to come. Numphu’s brother Kunpan ( called Pan for short ) was kind enough to drive his van down to the airport. Snow’s brother Kung and step sister Kim came too. We pushed our three heavy bags, two carry-on’s two pillows and diaper bag on a luggage cart. We went out the doors and SWOOSH!
STEAMY!

It was 12:30 AM on Thursday morning, and it was so humid, heavy, damp. I thought to myself. OK, this is it, lets get used to it now. Three weeks of tropical moist heavy air.
I briefly reminisced of my life in Michigan, where it could get very humid and heavy in the summers. Arriving at Numphu and Kriang’s at 1:20 AM, the house was still…

The front lobby is huge. Very high two story ceiling and there’s this huge unused space between the kitchen and the family room. Its like they haven’t decided what to do with it yet. To the front left of it is a staircase very high that leads up to the second floor bedrooms. Next to the stair case on the floor is a mini-warehouse of toys for the kids. Numphu has three, the youngest barely older than Alex, they also on the wall have these wooden cubby holes like a large kindergarten class has for shoes and hats, and scarves.

On the floor, there’s a rubber mat with all the letters and numbers, and the kids have amassed a small fleet of toy cars and bikes that are bunched up in the corner. It reminds me of an episode of Miami Vice, where drug kingpins have their superfluous car collections. The toys take up this corner where the stair case turns and ascends. The floor is white tile with smaller carpets near the couches. There’s two smaller rooms of couches and chairs. One site in front of the front door. Its like the antechamber. It greets you, there’s many photos and keepsakes here. Its rare to see anyone sitting in here, perhaps it’s the heat and the humidity from the door. There are fans all over the downstairs, the giant ceiling makes air conditioning the first floor daunting if not impossible.

We slept in the son’s room. There’s a massage table that’s like the top of a credenza for the room’s purpose, we put out our sundries . I thought cuz we got to sleep around 1:30 AM, we would be waking up around 9 AM, 10 AM, maybe later due to all that jet lag. No deal, when I looked at my watch when we woke up it was 6:30. What the heck? LOL. that’s the true evil of time change. You never know when your body will wake you up. So after a nice breakfast Snows mom made us fish and tempura breaded zucchini, and omelet with vegetables. Snow’s cousin and aunt own a small massage business near their home, where Snow’s mother works, so we went there for a massage for Snow. After that, we had lunch at a local noodle joint. There’s lots of these small restaurants, with small tables and you can get a really good bowl of ramen noodles like those you get in top ramen or Nissan, for around a dollar a bowl it’s a lunch with a drink.
We were going to go shopping for water and groceries, but we headed back to the house first. Snow put Alex down for a nap but she didn’t sleep for a while,. I went in there and finally she went to sleep. We all did around 2:30 PM. Then the next thing I know we are all awake, and it’s close to 6 PM! Snow’s mom came home in a taxi so we all rushed out in it.

I thought we would have dinner with Numphu, her husband Kriang, her mother and father, and the rest of us, but we were surprised. Kriang coaches rugby for Thailand and apparently he had a really bad knee injury. Doctors moved his surgery up from the end of March to that week, so they were all at hospital including his mother, his aunt and uncle. Snow said a lot of people were showing up at hospital to say hi to him. He is a police officer, but inherited a big company from his father, something about moving rocks down from the mountain up north. He has money, thus the nice house. But with the show at the hospital, no one is coming home at dinner time, so Snows mom, brother, sister and us, we have to make new plans. We went to this mall called The Crystal. Its like a nice outdoor mall, newly built it reminds me of the Grove in L.A. There’s a lot of American and Euro stores, we shop at Tops market which is a supermarket, where we stock up including water. For dinner we ate Pizza at Scuzzo, which supposedly is from Naples, Italy originally. The pizza is pretty good. We got one with olives, mushrooms, ham, artichokes
And another with ham on half and onions on half. I think we got home around 830. At some point in the evening, Alex grabs my glasses case, opens it, plays with my glasses, and breaks them, snaps off the left arm. So now its very hard to wear them at all with just the one arm. I look funny with the glasses tilted diagonally.