Jetlag nearly conquered!

I stayed awake until 10:30 p.m. last night and slept straight through until 5 a.m.! I’m currently ravenously, insanely hungry, however, because my stomach thinks it’s, what, time for whatever meal of the day involves a million calories of food? I don’t know.
I am now in Bangkok, at the blandly posh and international/Western-style Royal Princess Hotel. My last morning on the island was excellent – I walked down to the southwest coast of the island from Tubtim beach and back, and it felt really good to actually exert myself after 24 hours of prolonged immobilization on airplanes followed by 48 hours of complete sloth. Highlights of the hike were:
1. being offered a ride by a tiny little Thai girl on a moped (even though the whole point of the expedition was to get some exercise, I do not have the strength of character to turn down a free moped ride along a bumpy gravel road through the jungle in the sunshine). It was also my first conversation that was completely in Thai:
girl: thai thai thai thai where you thai thai? (gesturing at moped)
me: wai beach
girl: thai thai good (moving up so I could get on)
me: good thank you!
*insert fifteen minute moped ride*
girl: thai thai here wai beach
me: good thank you very much!
girl: you’re welcome
2. Running into a middle aged French couple in the middle of the jungle with all their beach paraphernalia. The guy sang out as I came near, “Bonjour!” and I was just so tickled that he would be so confident in his Frenchness to just say bonjour in the middle of nowhere, southeast Asia. They asked how to get to the nearest beach, which was also hilarious, because it’s like, OK, the island is something like a kilometre wide – it’s REALLY HARD to get too far away from the beach.
3. Finding little rocky place to have a totally private nudie swim in the ocean
After my exciting morning, I got a speedboat back to the mainland and found myself a bus back to Bangkok (no real highlights except for getting off at a rest stop, and I went to the little snack place to buy water and a Catalan couple were yackering away in front of me in line! They really are everywhere. It’s great.)
We finally pulled up at the Bangkok bus station after dark, and I got a tuktuk (instrument of death-by-traffic-fumes) to the hotel, where I was met by Max, the tour guide for the trip (lanky effeminate hipster Thai guy in his late twenties) and then had fifteen minutes to get myself cleaned up before we joined up with the rest of the group to go out for dinner at a little outdoor café place at the insane night market/tourist mecca/bar scene near the Khoi San road.
Brief first impressions of the group:
– Australian couple in their late thirties/early forties, seem nice, she looks/sounds exactly like one of the characters from Neighbours although I can’t remember which one.
– slightly dim but sweet Aussie girl; already worrying about spiders in the jungle.
– plump New Yorker in mid¬twenties; has strong opinions about things like beer and the 49ers, so perhaps not a lot in the way of common interests, but seemed like a cheerful kind of a dude.
- guy in late twenties from Toronto, eh, sat the far end of the table so I didn’t talk to him barely at all. I will need to overcome my instinctive dislike of creative facial hair if we are going to be friends. It will be an opportunity for self-improvement.
- chicky in early thirties, from Minnesota, was extremely jetlagged and having trouble staying awake, so didn’t say a whole lot, but I have premonitions of major personality disorder.
So the initial hit off the others in the group isn’t brilliant, but meh, we’ll see. After dinner we were let loose on the market; I know you’ll all be surprised to hear that I decided to ignore the girls in tight spandex dresses printed with major beer labels beckoning customers in to the bars with signs advertising “Very Strong Thai Cocktail 80 baht!” and I went instead to get myself a massage by a no-nonsense woman in her fifties who must have weighed about eighty pounds and who threw me around like a sack of potatoes, and from there back to the hotel to bed lovely bed.
Today we are going to do sightseeing around Bangkok, which I am a little terrified of, having now experienced Bangkok traffic first hand. This is a VERY BIG CITY and it takes a REALLY LONG TIME to go anywhere via any of the modes of transportation that I have experienced so far…