Hi Gram,
I had a good walk this morning. It’s one that I’ve done before with the group but today was my first time doing it on my own. I walked down the main road to the beach. Usually we walk up a set of stairs but the tide was in today and the bottom of the stairs were under water. Not a big deal if you’re barefoot and just going to the cafe nearby, but less than ideal in gym shoes with a plan to walk another few miles. Luckily, there’s a side alley that stays above the tide and leads to another path. I followed that alley past market stalls with fishing boats moored behind them. The boats go out to catch their morning haul, then bring back their bounty and sell it in the market. In the mornings, though, it just smells really fishy and most of the stalls are still closed.

Past the market stalls, the road becomes a hill with a slow curve to the left for a while, then a switchback to the right. Monkeys are scattered along the whole road grooming each other, pushing rocks around, eating what they can find, and living their monkey lives. It’s always a tiny bit unnerving walking up to a posse of monkeys, not quite certain what they’re going to do, but they always either ignore the humans or scatter away. At the top of the hill, there’s a temple area with some market stalls and buddha statues plus the stairs.

I’ve talked about these stairs before. There are 128 stairs that climb up to a temple at the top. The view from the top is wonderful, looking out over the city. Having had climbed the steps feels good, an accomplishment towards health. Actually climbing the steps, though, especially after having just walked up the hill and not quite caught your breath yet, raises curses that my mother wouldn’t approve of. Once we reach the top of the steps each time, we all take a pause to enjoy the view and catch our breath. Despite being alone with nobody to discuss the views with, you can bet your sweet bippy that I took a few minutes up there to gather myself.

The walk back was much the same, although I took a fork in the alley leading back to the main road instead of the beach. After that, it’s just a matter of keep walking until you get back to where you started. I ran into Joe and Joann about halfway back and chatted with them on the rest of the walk, which made it seem to go a little quicker. I got back to the hotel and made myself some breakfast then took a shower before getting some chores done on the computer.

Around noon, I grabbed a songtaew to Blueport Mall to meet my friend Patty. We walked around and practiced our language skills a little, then headed to the food court for lunch. I hope she’s retaining more of the English than I am of the Thai. She’ll tell me a word, I’ll practice it a few times, then be confident that I know it. An hour later, I have no idea what the word was. I need to start writing some of these things down, but an added challenge is that Thai uses a different alphabet than English. The best I can do for now is to write things phonetically then hope I can decipher my shorthand for pronunciation. Anyway, we headed to the food court where she showed me how to get the money card, then ordered Pad Thai for each of us, mine with chicken and hers with prawns. I think it’s just in the nature of Thai women, but I felt taken care of the whole time. She opened my water for me, made sure that I had the right silverware, showed me how to mix the ingredients on the plate, and probably lots more. Speaking of silverware, they have this cool machine that sterilizes the metalware that you pick from a tray. The meal is also served on an actual plate that they clean and re-use. This is so much less wasteful than plastic everything!

After lunch, we walked around the mall some more, then headed back outside because the mall was actually making us cold. We took the songtaew back to my hotel and hung out in some chairs for a bit. The rest of the day was kind of a blur of napping, playing on the phone, and looking things up online. It was the rest and relaxation that I needed and I ended up going to sleep a little early.