Rubber Soul

Feb. 2

After I finished my breakfast curry, Joanna suggested we take a walk in the park. The park, Chuvit Garden, is on land privately owned by Chuvit Kamolvisit, a rather colorful local figure who made his fortune running brothels under the cover of massage parlors.

Look up the park on Google, and make sure that you follow the link in the references to the Guardian article. According to a stone over the gate, the park was dedicated to the Lord Jesus Christ in 2005.

It’s a pleasant shaded spot for a stroll. There are a couple of small Buddhist shrines of the sort you see everywhere in Thailand. No Jesus shrines, or at least, none that I recognized as such.

There is also an example of a (more or less) traditional Thai house, with an explanation of the architecture.

The house is made of wooden panels joined by wooden dowels. It can be dismantled and moved.

This house has a concrete first story that breaks with tradition. The original Thai houses were built on stilts, giving wind or flood water unrestricted passage. Raising the house avoided washout and also cooled it a bit.

We came back to the hotel until noon or so and then went out for lunch. We stopped at a market selling food and clothes and bought a couple of pastries, one a cake that was filled with bean paste and the other a crepe wrapped around a banana.

We went to the food court on Soi 1 for more Thai noodle soup. It’s right down the road from Doilanka, where we stopped again for coffee and ate our pastry. I reminded Bam of our names, so he was more relaxed this time.

We explored a couple of sois that we had missed before. We went into a supermarket, which is always fun anywhere.

I had been told that wine is more expensive in Thailand than in the States, and this gave me a chance to see by how much. Wine that would cost me $10 or $15 a bottle at Total Wine in West Orange runs almost twice that here.

Larry and Sanna met us at the hotel around 4:30 to hit a few bars and have dinner. We started with Singha and Tiger at Viva.

Then we drifted into Insanity. That’s a nightclub near the restaurant. We sat outside and everybody must have been taking their meds, because it was pretty low-key at that hour.

Next we made it to the hit of the day, a Thai restaurant called Cabbages & Condoms. The proceeds of the business are donated to support AIDS prevention and research, and to family planning efforts.

The restaurant’s website guarantees that the food will not cause pregnancy.

At the entrance to the dining room, there is a display of mannequins dressed in various costumes, including Santa Claus, made of condoms. You can buy a pot of artificial flowers, made with colored condoms, in the gift shop. Yes, there is a gift shop.

You can also buy a T-shirt that claims there is a condom for everyone. The pessimist droops a bit, for instance, and the boxer has a glove on the tip.

I particularly like the safety poster. It shows stick-figure couples in various postures, each one with a message: OK; danger, use condom; don’t swallow.

In addition to the mannequins wearing condoms, there is another photo opportunity. There are four cut-outs of rubbers in various sizes with spaces for people to peer out. This may give new meaning to the term “dickhead.”

Dinner was terrific. It included pork neck, duck in red curry, sticky rice, red rice (a dark maroon with the texture of brown rice), and a few other dishes I don’t recall in detail but they included vegetables, different meats, and various kicks of chili or not. Joanna’s stomach can’t take hot stuff, so she orders her Thai food ma pet.

We had only had two beers each with dinner, so when we strolled back, we stopped at Kiwi, a bar near the hotel on Soi 8. They had Old Speckled Hen on tap. The only other place I’d had that is the Churchill on 28th Street in New York.

Joanna wasn’t drinking, except for a sip of mine from time to time, but she started to droop. It was a school night for Larry. So we called it quits. Sanna, by far the youngest of the group, went back to the bar after we left.

Another fine day somewhere else.

Sleep well and keep safe.

Harry