Adventures in Thailand

We have been in Bangkok for 2 weeks now, and what a time it has been!  This city is so alive and reverberating with energy you can feel; it’s quite exciting.  Several thoughts on the embassy: it is huge.  Massive.  At the very least 3 times as large as Ankara was, and Ankara wasn’t small by any stretch of the imagination.  So far we are a little disappointed by the lack of community involvement meaning that people seem to do their own thing here.  I guess that’s a good thing too, because there’s a ton of stuff to do here in Bangkok.  You could never do it all.  Ankara wasn’t exactly a happening place, so people tended to band together and entertain each other.  I guess we just have to get used to it.  Another thing about work: I had told many family and friends that I was probably going to Beijing for a month in July to help out with the Olympics and the move to the new embassy compound there; unfortunately (or fortunately ) that’s not going to happen.  The State Department is facing huge budget cuts across the board, and embassies just like ours have to find ways to cut costs.  One of the first things to go was our travel fund.  This is unfortunate because that is built into our staffing patterns.  We have 6 guys like me, which is a lot, but there’s always been a few of us traveling, helping out other embassies/consulates when they need it.  Regional support is one of our main things.  We’ll see what happens with that. On the social front, we went to the Marine Happy Hour on Friday night, and had a ball, just like we always do.  We met a lot of people there, including a couple of Thai girls who invited us out later that night to go to this club.  We were with our friend from our apartment building whose husband I work with, and after much deliberation, we decided to give it a shot.  Truth be told, we had been drinking for a while and were getting a little tired.  But we felt it was an opportunity to get to know some people a little better, so we couldn’t pass it up. We piled into a cab and took a very long ride (Bangkok traffic never sleeps) to this club called Santika.  It was a very nice place; it reminded me of the swank clubs you see on TV and in the movies.  A place like this would never be in Fredericksburg…  We went to the bar and our every need was catered to.  The girls we were with obviously frequented the place and were kind of like VIPs.  Therefore, we got free food and a nice seat in a not-crowded area.  The rest of the club was packed.  There was a stage that sat below most of the main floor of the club.  It looked like a Greek theater or something like that.  At first there was a DJ playing hip-hop who was pretty good.  Then he stopped and this band came on doing covers of what was a very eclectic mish-mash of songs like Linkin Park, Sean Kingston, Thai pop and others.  At least they were pretty good.  The lead singer was this very clearly American guy who looked like he came straight out of Stafford county (sorry for anyone who is from Stafford, but you know what I’m talking about).  He had on a bandana and it could be said he was attempting to emulate Eminem, oversize T-shirt, jeans and everything else.  He rapped, and then these 2 Thai guys would scream at the top of their lungs a-la Chester Bennington of Linkin Park (he’s the guy who screams for them, too).  There was also a nice outside area of the club which was much more relaxed, and on this night, very pleasant as the weather was perfect.  It was a great area to go to when you needed a break from the bass and screaming inside.  By about 1am we had had enough, and took a cab home to complete our first real night out in Bangkok.  It was eye opening and a complete blast.  We recovered the next day by hanging out at the pool.  Did I mention we have a pool? Living in Bangkok (so far) is like a perpetual vacation… 

So we have completed our tour in Ankara and are now back in Virginia doing the whirlwind month known as home leave.  I say whirlwind because we are about to embark on a 2 week trip that will take us from Fredericksburg to Hilton Head to New York City and back.  Then after that we’ll be getting to the Outer Banks in North Carolina for a few days, not to mention Bedford, VA.  It’s been nuts already, and we’ve only been back for a little over a week.   The flight back was awesome.  Mer and I had our first business class experience, and it is amazing.  So comfortable and the food was actually pretty tasty!  It will be hard to fly economy again.   Good thing we don’t have to when we travel to Bangkok.We were sad to leave Ankara mostly because of the friends we had to leave behind.  We also fell in love with Turkey; we had an amazing, eye opening time while we were there.  We’ll always have fond memories of it, because it was our first home after we were married.  On to new things and making more memories in Bangkok!!