Off to See Our Daughter in Bangkok
[Continued from My Worst Day (Week?) in Thailand.]The conclusion to this sorry week was our trip to see Pakpao in Bangkok. We collected James from school, headed to Sri Ratcha where we collected Sam from his school and made our way to the northern part of Bangkok. The journey involved a fair amount of bumper to bumper traveling through Bangkok’s Friday night traffic — it is bad every other day of the week, just worse on Fridays! To make matters even less appetizing I had to contend with Mrs. Boss’ rather erratic driving, which saw me sitting in the front passenger seat doing an impersonation of a startled rabbit — in fact, rabbits that wanted to know how to act startled could have taken lessons from me such was my level of startledness! Mrs. Boss journeyed from one lane of the freeway to another for most of the trip and either completely ignored or, worse still, shouted and swore at those motorists who deigned it necessary to, quite understandably from where I sat, hoot their horn at her. When she was not traversing the lanes it appeared as though she believed the dotted white lines indicated that she had to travel along the centre of any one of them, she therefore chose to occupy two lanes of a fast moving freeway and not for the first time this week I felt my life was coming to its conclusion!
After approximately five hours in the car we reached our destination and Mrs. Boss had booked us into a hotel very close to our daughter’s residence. On the face of it, the hotel looked fine. It was only a year or so old and though sparsely furnished, everything that was there was modern. We had managed to secure two rooms with a private hallway between them so the boys were separate from Mrs. Boss and I when it came to the sleeping arrangements. After such a journey we were all tired and hungry, so we headed off to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. Whilst en route, Mrs. Boss telephoned Pakpao to advise of our arrival. She was not pleased to be advised by our daughter that she was out eating with friends and would see us in a couple of hours. The whole point of coming here was to see Pakpao — if we had just wanted to go for a meal then Pattaya has a thousand restaurants for us to choose from!
After dining we returned to the hotel and all of us collapsed onto our respective beds. Mrs. Boss and I enjoyed watching a movie whilst Sam and James remained in their room and relatively peaceful. Pakpao arrived about eleven at night and after the hello’s and a bit of chat was heading back to her room and taking Sam and James with her.
Mrs. Boss decided to take a shower, but found the water in our room to be cold and the water heater not functioning. I gave it a go, but had to admit defeat. She adjourned to the shower in the boys’ room but found that was also not dispensing any hot water. A call to reception saw a young man come upstairs and verify that we were telling the truth, neither shower was working as it should. He was followed 30 minutes later by a maintenance man who fiddled around for a while before informing Mrs. Boss that neither of the shower’s had been working for some considerable period of time. He did manage to fix the one in the boys’ room, but ours had to be replaced and that was most assuredly not happening tonight!
Mrs. Boss was immediately on the telephone endeavouring to get either a change of rooms or a refund. She was met only by the inane giggling of the Thai receptionist and, given everything that had happened over the last week, this was enough to tip her over the edge. After several telephone calls and no small amount of shouting by Mrs. Boss it was agreed we would move into the boys’ room, they would stay the remainder of the night with Pakpao and the hotel would refund two-thirds of our money. This was something of a result but given the week we had endured it was obviously not going to prove to be ideal. It in fact proved to be far from ideal as the room we were now occupying was facing the road outside which had vast amounts of traffic traveling along it all night and early morning — neither of us, therefore, got more than an hour’s sleep!
The next day was mainly spent shopping for the provisions our daughter required. This was followed by another trip to the Vietnamese restaurant and then the long slog home. Fortunately Mrs. Boss was more on her game for the return leg and the trip passed without too much in the way of incident. Given the way life had treated us over the last seven days or so this was something of a rare blessing.
So there you are, a week where from the bowels of hell have spewed forth over me. Given that I have spent over three years in Thailand and endured several such weeks I have no doubt that another series of episodes will unfold shortly!
