I Arrived in Bangkok

My visa is only good for 30 days at a time. My plan was, until that can be fixed, to skip over the border to India (only 2 hours away), have some tea, and then come back. But getting an Indian visa in Bangladesh is comically hard. So. I’ve decided to go to Bangkok to a) leave the country before my visa expires b) get an Indian visa from Bankok and c) have fun.

The day before I left I took a bus up from Gaibandha to Dhaka and spent the night in a hotel vomiting up my organs.

Luckily, today I am fine and left for Bangkok.

I arrived at 5pm and the sun was already setting. Everything around me is pink, blue and green. It’s like a lollipop world. People’s hair match their cars which match their cellphone and their 6 inch heels.

I’m staying in a “serviced” apartment. Which is basically a hotel that charges less. I had only a few hours of sleep between retching the night before and my eyes were droopy. But I was in a new country and I have to be fabulous. So I went next door from my apartment and got a thai massage. Only ½ hour into being in this country.

The massage was pretty epic. I felt immensely relaxed but I can’t say that it felt all good. In fact, a lot of it hurt. The woman was very good at finding pressure points and squeezing them. She moved my body around in all sorts of directions. I think at one point I was balancing on my head, my feet in a pretzel position next to my ear and my hands nowhere to be felt. But after, after. I felt glorious. I bowed profusely at my new goddess and head out for some exploring and food.

Thailand is strange. There were many shops dedicated to gamers. Large, plush chairs set up with whole families glued to computer screens watching their own avatars. There were some shops called “family” where I think people were playing games with video cameras?

Many many karaoke halls advertised “VIRGINS!” I guess virgins make good singers? The street food looked incredible. I decided on a buffet style BBQ. You get a tray, and pile what you want to cook onto it. There were buckets of meat, fish, noodles, soups anything you can think of. I chose a bunch of indistinguishable meat and some squid and some crazy half crab/half lobster mutants.

It may have been the most adventurous first meal I could have tried because on top of trying all sorts of things I’ve never seen before, I had to know how to cook it too. The waitress helped me get a snail out of its shell and how to eat my shell fish mutant. I had two dishes that were pre cooked and they were incredible. All the things I had to cook were weird and kind of gross.

But the good news is I found a fruit and nut toblerone at the 7/11.

Lā,

Chelsea