Hi Gram,
Today was our rest day at the gym, and I couldn’t be more grateful! I slept in as best as I could, then reluctantly got out of bed with my legs aching and the rest of my body aching too from sympathy. I lazed about for a few hours, did some research on travel for next week, then Nattiya and I decided to head to Bluport mall. There were two things I needed to get done, and they were both at Bluport.

First, I have been craving pizza and there’s a pizza restaurant just inside the mall that has been tempting me the last few times I was there. I didn’t put much faith in it being good pizza, but when you’re starving a saltine can be the best damned cracker you’ve ever tasted. Similarly, I figured any pizza would hit the spot when I haven’t had any in a couple of months. With that in mind, take the next bit of the story with a grain of salt. This was some of the best pizza I’ve ever had! We ordered (well, I ordered – Nattiya couldn’t have cared less and just went along with her crazy foreigner satisfying his craving) a spicy chicken pizza with pineapple, seasoned chicken, thousand island sauce, and not just cheese folded into the crust, but sausage and cheese folded in. Seeing as it’s not America and they don’t know that we shortcut it, this wasn’t just crumbles of sausage, but two links of sausage in each slice’s crust. I’m only here for another week, but I just might go back and get another pizza before we leave. It was that good. Not gourmet, not the highest quality ingredients, definitely not Chicago or New York quality, but in its own way, this pizza stood alone with pride.

The second thing that I needed to do was get a suitcase for all the extra crap that I’ve accumulated on this trip. I have a bag that I bought in Bali, but it is such low quality that I wasn’t sure it would make it to Thailand without shredding apart. We looked at the bags down in the bargain basement, then went upstairs to the department store to look at the name brand bags. The name brand bags were too pricey and I was too lazy to walk back downstairs, so I ended up with a bag with a fancy sounding name but no internet presence for a decent price. The salesman assured me that, unlike the basement bags, this one comes with a warranty! I should put value in the warranty on a bag with no name recognition outside of that store, sold at a store so generic they just named it after the mall (or maybe the mall was named after this generic department store?), in a town that I may never come back to? Okay, sure. In any case, while the salesman thought he’d assured me with the warranty the truth is that the price was still low enough that I was too lazy to walk back to the basement of the mall and get the very similar bag for sale there. We left the mall and were lucky to grab a bus right away with very few passengers, so my new suitcase didn’t infringe on anybody’s legroom. Back at the hotel, I emptied the old bag and sorted my stuff into the shiny new red suitcase before letting the pizza food coma set in and knock me out for a nap.

I awoke from my slumber and was informed that her friend who was in town for a few days was on her way to meet us for dinner. We all met at the lobby, then walked down the street to Cicada Market. I had never eaten there before, always just walking through to see the art and listen to the music. They have a ticket system where you buy tickets of varying values, then exchange them with the food vendors. I’ve seen this system at carnivals in the U.S. and I don’t like it there. Back home, you either spend your tickets or they go to waste. I was trying to figure out how many tickets we would need so I didn’t end up with too many. I later learned that here, you just trade the tickets back for cash at the end of the evening – it doesn’t matter how many you buy initially. Nattiya just told me some number to buy, I got them and grumbled, then we all found the food and drinks that we wanted. I was relieved when we traded the tickets back for cash, then laughed at myself because the different was like three or four dollars. I forget that everything is so affordable here. With that all behind us, we said goodbye to her friend, then walked back to the room to find our way to sleep.