In the fall of 2016 while I was serving in Tashkent, I took a quick trip by myself to Bangkok for dental care. Nine years later, we found ourselves serving just an hour’s flight away, so we decided to visit — me for the second time and V for the first time. There’s nothing like a weekend in a new location to change the scene — and your perspective.
A couple of weeks ago, a three-day weekend coincided with my birthday. V and I arranged to go to Bangkok. The main purpose of our trip was to pick up cold-chain medications that cannot come through diplomatic mail and which are not available on the market in Burma. We made appointments at a Thai hospital to be seen by a doctor so we could get local-ish versions of our prescriptions. We also coordinated with our health insurance in advance in case there was a direct billing option.
But I wanted to go to Bangkok for other reasons, too. V had never been, and I wanted to show him the Grand Palace and Chatuchak weekend market. I also wanted to get my hair highlighted for the first time in almost three months and see a dermatologist. I made those appointments ahead of time as the trip started to take shape.
Our trip started on a Friday afternoon after work. We arrived early for our flight to the deserted international departures terminal in Rangoon’s airport. The duty free shops stood empty, many of their products appearing dusty. I looked around with interest at the few types of people who were flying out — as far as I could tell, all foreigners.
We flew the short distance to Bangkok and easily caught an airport taxi into the city. Less than an hour later, we were checking into our hotel. We weren’t hungry, having enjoyed some delicious tea leaf salad at the airport before leaving Burma. Instead, we headed up to the hotel’s speakeasy-style rooftop bar for a nightcap — the same bar I’d visited with my friend and A-100 classmate K during my brief trip in 2016. He was posted in Bangkok at the time and had shown me around the city.
Saturday morning after a delicious breakfast, I headed out on foot to my hair appointment. My number one choice salon hadn’t been available, as the owner and his partner were traveling abroad at the time of my visit. However, my second choice location got the job done. It wasn’t perfect, but the bar for me was low: as long as they dealt with my roots and didn’t fry my hair, I wasn’t too fussed.
After four hours-plus of being in the salon chair, I was ready to move on with my day. V and I met up for a late lunch at Dean and DeLuca and ran some errands. Our HHE and Consumables are not slated to arrive in Burma until mid-November. So we went to a big pharmacy I’d spotted near the salon and bought supplemental essentials like lotion, face wash, sunscreen, cold medicine, and other OTC and hygiene items.
We spent the rest of the day walking around and running errands, until the heat and humidity — and a torrential late-afternoon thunderstorm did us in.
Later I kind of regretted that we’d walked all the way to the ultra-luxurious (and ultra-crowded) Siam Paragon mall (where we didn’t even need anything) instead of just finishing our grocery shopping right away at the shops in Central World. We kind of wiped ourselves out in the heat. And as it turned out, that was the most unstructured free time we’d end up having on the trip.
The second day in Bangkok was Sunday: my birthday. We started the day with a nice breakfast and swimming at our hotel’s beautiful rooftop pool. My day was similarly bifurcated by an appointment that didn’t start until 11:00 a.m. and to my surprise, ate up five hours.
I’d hoped to try to get to the Grand Palace or at least Chatuchak weekend market afterwards. But the palace closed at 4:30 p.m., with the last tickets being sold at 3:30 p.m. and another afternoon’s rainy downpours ruled out walking around outside. Once my dermatologist appointment was over, I was also self-conscious about all the laser marks from sun damage I’d had removed and going out for a birthday celebration didn’t sound as fun. Feeling short on time and energy, I settled for a birthday take-away Tex-Mex dinner.
Our final morning in Bangkok was — unbeknownst to us — a local holiday. Our morning hospital trip was therefore very efficient, with our taxi driver taking us from the hotel to the hospital in five minutes when it should have taken closer to 15 minutes.
The registration and check-in process was smooth, and we were fortunate to have arrived 20 minutes early for 8:00 a.m. appointments. By the time we departed the hospital around 10:45 a.m., there was a crush of people from all over the world in the downstairs lobby and crowding the elevators, so we were glad to be on our way.
After a couple more last-minute errands, we returned to our hotel, repacked our suitcases, arranged our coolers with medication and cheeses, checked out, and called a Grab to the airport. Unlike in Burma, in Thailand I could actually link my credit card to the Grab app, so I didn’t even have to spend my last baht cash.
We arrived at BKK in plenty of time to check in, have a leisurely lunch, and do some duty-free shopping. I even enjoyed a Dairy Queen mint chocolate chip blizzard! The Bangkok airport is a somewhat overwhelming testament to western consumer excess… to put it mildly. And I was there for it.
In the end, I regretted that while in Bangkok we weren’t able to do more fun touristy things together due to our tight schedules and limited time. I also realized in retrospect that I probably hadn’t been realistic about how long it would take for us to finish up the business that brought us there so we could have more fun. I just felt a bit bad for V because he spent most of his time waiting for me and didn’t see much of the city.
But during the nine cumulative hours I spent in appointments without him, V was focused on resting or buying things on his list, rather than rushing around to sightsee. So it’s just as likely we both needed some downtime that just happened to occur on our trip. The stress and financial uncertainty of the government shutdown — then in its second week — collided somewhat uncomfortably with our limited opportunity to procure items we wanted to bring home to Rangoon.
When we left, we had the sense that we would be back to Bangkok, if not before the end of the year, then certainly early next year. And next time — now that we’ve broken the ice and familiarized ourselves with the closest major city to us outside of Burma — I think we’ll spend a little more time looking around. Maybe this first trip was just what we needed, when we needed it.
Collecting Postcards 