Deck and dining

Friday July 1

An undetermined time of morning. Hours and days are already foggy. It’s been minutes, hours, days since we boarded planes from other places.

The group has shrunk from five to four. We make plans to lunch at Deck, a medium posh restaurant along the river. The boys buy Newsweek and make plans to watch BBC and dissect episodes of CSI.

We walk to the port and take the river taxi down the dirty brown. Women can’t stand next to the monks, so we shuffle to the middle of the boat. We get off and wander around a white estate, poking our heads into every alley and private room.

The waiters at Deck eye us when we order the cheapest dish, to share, and put our own bottled water on the table. We soak up the view and make the staff take our photo. Then we wander out through the dark, wet walkways back to the port and pay three hundred baht to cross the river.