This leaves me with a week to do pretty much whatever I want ... and here I sit, paralyzed with indecision.
I could follow my classmates south to the laid-back party beaches near Phuket and on the way back meet up with my German friends in the expat town of Hua Hin. Or, I might head north to Chiang Mai and eat nothing but amazing curry noodles and chicken, khao soi gai, for three days. For sure I will take a day trip west on Thailand's old-timey railway to see the famed bridge over the river Kwai near Kanchanaburi. Classmate Roslyn made me promise to go east to the sin-city town Pattaya and meet her American friend who has lots of useful connections for me.
What I cannot do is sit here marking time in Metro Park. Because that's exactly what we all did last week, and it drove us literally to drink.
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By Sunday troubles in town have abated and we can safely venture out again, so the Metro Parkers taxi over to Wat Pho, the largest Buddhist temple in Bangkok, which runs a training school for traditional Thai massage. My stressed-out classmates can hardly wait for their glorious hour-long kneading.
I should have warned them that Thai massage is not like a spa treatment. Think of it more like yoga being performed on your body by a trash compactor. You wear what looks like karate pants that are loose enough to accommodate the moves and stretches they put you through.
At one point Betsy lets out a yelp. The masseur is working on the hand that she broke in two places when she was drunk at a party one time and punched a dude.
I get the impression that no one enjoyed Thai massage very much. "Gonna be sore tomorrow," someone mumbles.
On the way out of Wat Pho, my classmates get snared by a tout who offers to "help" them plan their tour of the sights. I stand back and watch. The tout asks to see our admission receipts from the temple and then makes a show of marking each with a purple felt pen. This grants us free admission to all the other sites, he says, "and these drivers right here will take you around, just 20 baht for each."By "drivers," he means tuk-tuk drivers. I do my best to keep a straight face. A tuk-tuk is a three-wheeled transport that seats two or three vict- I mean, passengers. Every last tuk-tuk driver in Bangkok is a demon dispatched from Hell to prey upon clueless farang tourists. He will take you everywhere EXCEPT where you want to go -- to a tailor, a diamond seller, an antique shop, anyplace that will pay him a meager commission for delivering fresh white meat.
So we pile into two tuk-tuks and away we go. The drivers are on good behavior at first, whisking us to some ornate temple or other. Our next stop is a clothier. The driver begs us to at least go in. "They give me voucher to pay for gas," he pleads. But inside, the owner stops us at the door: "You need to buy membership card to look around." Betsy, who is 6'1" and towers over both tuk-tuk drivers, wheels back outside and informs them: "We're going to lunch now."
The villains carry us hell-bent on a roundabout course NOT to the food court we requested but to a nondescript restaurant with fancy prices -- yet another commission opportunity for the tuk-tuks. So we cut them loose and get on with our lives.
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It is Belgian Erwin's last night in town before returning to his home in Cambodia, so we stay up way too late at Warren's apartment playing a card game that Betsy teaches us, a drinking game called Presidents & Assholes. Just about every card combination requires that someone, or everyone, take a drink (or at least pretend to). Warren, who is 23, doesn't catch on to the "pretend" strategy and pays the price the next morning, I'm sure.
These people might be a very bad influence on me.
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