Ready to leave Bangkok!

I'm hitting the tracks tomorrow and heading north out of Bangkok. The shine is gone, and the seamy underbelly of the city is showing itself, and I've never been particularly fond of seaminess. But, besides being pretty revolted by all the white tourist men I see wining and dining Thai women, I had a fairly decent day. I needed to get my train ticket for tomorrow, so got on a bus to the train station. I noticed that the red lights seemed to be ridiculously long, so when the bus was caught at one I started to time it on my watch. At six minutes, I thought it was funny. At 10 minutes I was baffled. At 14 minutes the locals started to get antsy. At 16 minutes the locals started to get off! At EIGHTEEN MINUTES at a continuously red light (the cross traffic having had four or five turns) the bus driver gave up and drove through it. Seriously.... 18 minutes! Obviously something was wrong with that traffic light.

(By the way, you should know when crossing streets in Bangkok that actually have a crosswalk AND a crossing signal, there is no warning as to when the little green walking man will suddenly turn to red and you are half way across six lanes of traffic when they start to drive. You might have 18 minutes to cross, or about two seconds. Good luck!)

This evening I had dinner with some friends of my aunt. They took me to a place on the river, and ordered all sorts of things that they thought I should try. I had Tom Yum (?) soup, square breaded sausage things (yummy!), beef slices, cashew chicken curry, and something that was either a very large shrimp or small lobster, which was fried and eaten whole... shell and all. I dutifully followed my host's lead and ate the whole damned thing. (It was fried, so it wasn't too bad. Crunchy.)

Very full now, and looking forward to heading to the guest house and packing my backpack up again. (Sigh...)