Bev's worst travel nightmare is realized today...NFL in Bangkok!!!! We watched the game over breakfast. Go COLTS!!! I hate the Patsies (sorry, Marcus). Doug, sorry about the Ravens, bro. But when all else fails, remember that team Pootie Tang won it all! Pootie rules. Superbowl should be a good one. It will be at 6:30AM while we are somewhere in northern Thailand or maybe Laos. Not sure if we'll be able to watch, but we'll try to hunt down a western hotel if the...

Woke up at 6AM and felt refreshed. We both hit the gym at the hotel for a hard workout, and then we mapped out the rest of the day. We figured we would hit the weekend market via the sky train, do some trip planning (next stop, Chiang Mai?), go to Chinatown to explore and get dinner, and then we would to the Night Bazaar, near the Muay Thai kickboxing stadium. In Chinatown, we were approached by "Professor Joe" from Singapore, who was really helpful and gave us ...

With our attempts at dedicating our time to learn the language thwarted, we decided to explore one of the big Thai markets, Pratunam market. Whatever you can think of, it is sold at this market. We explored the market, got our first in-country pad thai, and we returned to the hotel. We hit happy hour at the hotel, and surprisingly we passed out again. I'm not sure if it is the heat (90's and very humid during the day) or the schedule over the past 10 days, but w...

Although we tried to learn Thai using a one-month on-line subscription to Rosetta Stone, we needed a lot more time with the software. We thought we would take some Thai lessons in Bangkok, so we took a cab to the American University Language Institute. We sat through a free hour of what was a 30-hour intro program. Basically, they teach an immersion approach and do not let you speak in class (or out) for the first 1000 hours. Needless to say, this wouldn't work f...

Got to hotel after an uneventful 40-minute cab ride. We were upgraded to a beautiful suite at the Royal Orchid Bangkok (all that work travel was worth a LOT of hotel points!), and we slept like babies. We are going to use Bangkok as a staging location for the rest of Thailand. We will return here at the end of March, so we'll do more sightseeing then.