August 5th, 2019
We had another nice morning of sleeping in and hanging out until it was time for our train to Bangkok. When we purchased our tickets yesterday, I asked Brendan to make sure we have a window seat since we are travelling by day I wanted to make sure to see the scenery. The guy said no problem but when we got on the train we both had aisle seats. I guess there was a bit of a language barrier during that transaction. Oh well, you can’t sweat the small stuff right? I was still able to see pretty good views from the aisle and it was a pretty train ride. A lot of the time you could see the coastline on one side and the hilly, jungle interior out the other.
After we got on the train a lady came through with a tray of food. We had jasmine rice, mackerels, and chicken with basil in these little containers.
I offered the guy next to me my mackerels as I knew I would not be able to eat them, but he declined. Brendan ended up eating both our mackerels and our chickens and I had the container of white rice. He said the mackerels were full of little bones that just shattered when you bit into it, so he just had to chew them up really good and swallow.
I was super surprised when he opted to eat my dish of mackerels also! Lucky for me Brendan had this little miniature, to-go thing of soy sauce in his backpack and gave it to me for the rice so that was nice. I’m not complaining about the food at all as I was surprised to even get something. I just personally couldn’t eat anything but the rice. We finished the meal with some Oreos we had in our backpack (I also offered some Oreos to the guy next to me as I thought I should offer him something better than the mackerel, but he again declined). The guy next to me did not speak the entire time and I am guessing he did not know English and probably pretty quickly surmised that I did not know Thai. While I was eating my rice, he did use hand motions to gesture I should be eating it with the spoon provided and not the fork. So, I switched the utensils I was eating the rice with and that was about our only interaction.
The train ride was long (over 7 hours) and we got into Bangkok late. I usually try to nap on long rides like this but since I was in the aisle and had a stranger next to me I had nothing to lean my head on so napping didn’t work out. After we finally got to our hostel we went out for a late dinner and my first impression of Bangkok is that I like it. Looking forward to exploring more tomorrow!
