Day 1

Breakfast at the hotel: egg-fried rice. Egg-fried rice for breakfast – I love that!

First day of lectures. To start, “welcoming remarks”. And then refreshments. First 2-hour lecture, okay. Lunch. Second 2-hour lecture, of which a large proportion is spent talking about teaching Grandma. Is Grandma really that interested in learning English at her age? And do we really need to devote so much time to the prospect? Oh wait, grammar. That makes much more sense. More refreshments. Third two-hour lecture. If it weren't for the fact the lecturer keeps bursting into song (he's the university choir leader, as we later discover) I would actually have nodded off (hey, it's been a long day!). Finish with a rousing sing-along.

Then to MBK (“what you would get if a market and a mall had a baby, and gave it steroids” ~Casandra). So I now have a phone. I didn't want to pay 1700 baht for a new handset so I got a second-hand Nokia 3310 for 1200 baht. It's retro. We also got ice-cream. I'm happy.

We were going to walk back to the hotel but we were brave and took the sky train. It's actually totally simple – there are only two lines and they only cross over at one point, Siam station. And only 20 baht. In coins. Coins? All we have is notes. We saw a sign for a change machine. But it turns out to be behind a plywood wall. So we tried the ticket booth. “Phya Thai, please” (that's our stop). I waited as the teller counts out the change, and Casandra did the same. We waited for him to give us our tickets. “Buy ticket at machine”. Okay. Back in line, and eventually we had our tickets. So we got on – we just had to change at Siam onto the other line. On arrival at Siam we dashed across the platform onto our waiting train. Only we didn't actually check it was going in the right direction. The next station should be Ratchathewi. “The next station is Chit Lom”. Ah. So we got off, changed platform, got on another train. And three stops later we were at the hotel. Simple.