On Monday we ate more of the pastries we purchased the day before for breakfast.

Sam’s sister and brother-in-law then picked us up for lunch at their favorite family restaurant.

I drank a pineapple drink.

We shared a lot of food.  The above crab nuggets were probably the best dish served.

The restaurant is famous in Bangkok for their BBQ chicken.  Their chicken is fine, but my mom’s home-made sweet BBQ sauce over chicken on the backyard grill is still the best.

Their crab fried rice was good.

The above green dish was described as a “local vegetable.”  It didn’t have a very strong taste, which is good, but was also a little rubbery, which is bad.

I like fried fish much more than steamed.  I think the frying brings out the sweet taste in the fish meat and the hard fried skin is a good contrast with the soft meat.  Steamed fish don’t have any of that.  They retain a sort of limpid milky taste which, although not something abhorrent to my tongue, doesn’t make me want a second helping.

These were the first whole tiger prawns I think I’ve had.  They are like mini-lobsters, except the meat has a more fishy taste to it.  They taste closer to shrimp than lobster for obvious reasons.

I snapped the above shot after leaving the restaurant.  All over Thailand people travel a bit less securely than in America.  Speed limits mean nothing.  Lanes mean nothing.  Safety means nothing (unless you’re a tourist, then they don’t want you to get hurt).  It wasn’t uncommon to see small children riding with their parents on motorcycles with no helmets and/or standing up in a sidecar.  In Bangkok of course this is hardly dangerous since Bangkok’s reputation for horrible traffic congestion is well deserved.

After eating lunch we were dropped off at Sam’s friend’s house in a different part of town that is more suburban.  Her friend is a very successful television personality and producer in Thailand and her house was befittingly beautiful and modern.  It reminded me of Dave Bowman’s “cosmic hotel” in 2001.

Which, of course, was the inspiration for the latter day Flynn’s home in Tron Legacy:

below are some shots of her house (just the living room) and garden:

Since this was our third day in Thailand and all I’d basically seen so far were the inside of restaurants and traffic, Sam’s friend agreed to drive us around Bangkok to see some sites (although mostly from inside the car).  Our first destination was their old high school, which is now the largest school in southeast asia.  It was like a small city for kids and it seemed like a nice place to go to school as they had a lot of amenities (olympic swimming pool, badmitton courts, volleyball courts, etc.) that certainly were never available at my high school.

A lot of Bangkok’s “downtown” stretches out in every direction.  Unlike in Los Angeles, where there are clusters of “nice” tall buildings with a clean break from smaller older dwellings and neighborhoods, Bangkok has new tall buildings going up all over the place, often straddling shantytowns made of untreated wood and metal siding.  From the freeway much of Bangkok looks like this:

After that we headed back into the regular Bangkok (tall buildings, etc.) and some temples were pointed out.  We stopped at one temple and walked half a block to Kaosarin Road.  There were a lot of the feet eating fish there, but Sam’s friend warned us that she heard a news report that many of them were the wrong kind of fish and they might eat the healthy skin off your feet – best we wait till we’re in Phuket to try that.

yes, even in Thailand.. you can’t escape Subway…

The Subway was next to Khaosan Road, which made sense since that road is a famous little tourist trap.  Probably the highest concentration of farang in Thailand.

Next we drove along the King’s residence until we got to the  monument of the fifth king of the current dynasty, which was relatively quiet.

After that we drove around on the freeway to an upscale restaurant district and had dinner at SpringSummer restaurant.

It is a minimalist fusion (I had tandori quesedillas) restaurant.  Like many of the upper class eateries the prices here were on par with any upscale similar place in Los Angeles.  I tried a $4 mixed drink with lychee, raspberry and carbonated water.