Off to Dinner

Back to the 9AM park meeting today.  It's a pretty good group - mostly men - Americans, UK natives, and a few from Australia and New Zealand.  Lots of sobriety, standard percentage of irritating personalities, a few of them on my last nerve already.  

On every trip of any length we inevitably run into a few days where we've done what the area has to offer.  We're unwilling to throw in the towel so we walk around aimlessly, not seeing much with benumbed eyes.  It's OK; a little frustrating but OK and almost impossible to avoid - we want to give ourselves time to see everything without having to sprint through it but don't want to linger too long.  Hard to calculate 8,261 miles away with only a computer and guide books to direct us.

Dinner is an authentic cultural experience for which we don't have quiiiiiiiite enough patience today.  We take a nap, clean up, and head off the busy main road down one of the side alleys or sois.  There's an open air restaurant full of Thais so we take a seat.  There's a dizzying array of menus - we need some help deciphering them, a service supplied by the waitress, who comes over none too quickly.  She's got a full restaurant so she takes KK's order, explains the menus, and says she'll come back.  She does not.  She appears, actually, to be the cook.  KK gets her food from someone else who doesn't speak English and doesn't take orders, waving vaguely to the open air kitchen.  By the time we share her meal and get my meal ordered we're both thirsty.  God help us trying to get someone over to take a drink order - fortunately, we notice bottles of mineral water and bottles of ozonated water piled onto a corner of the table.  We pop the top on one of the ozones and quaff.  It has a vaguely medicinal taste.  We pay and go home.  

It was one of those nights where we both wanted to understand how everything works instead of sitting there like a couple of dumb asses fingering greasy menus.