Day 1: January 19

We flew to Bangkok from Frankfurt for 11 hours, a long journey. We were a little tired from flying, and couldn’t sleep. But we were fed twice, and quite deliciously by airplane food standards. We arrived in Bangkok at 9 a.m. Volchiy had taken a small bottle of perfume with him, which opened during transport and spilled all over our things in the luggage — the smell was unbearable. At first I couldn’t understand who nearby had doused themselves with so much perfume, and then it turned out to be the backpack.

From Bangkok’s main airport we went to another, smaller airport by free shuttle bus. Tomorrow we have a flight to Krabi.

Bangkok looks much cooler than Kyiv — multi-level interchanges, skyscrapers. While we were driving, we kept staring out the window. Palm trees all around. The air is very humid, hot, almost thick. All of this made our heads spin; it felt as if we were on another planet, in another dimension. It was hard to believe that all this was happening to me, that just some 20 hours earlier there had been snow and subzero temperatures outside the window.

Our hotel was located not far from the airport, in a back alley. We didn’t find it right away, but thanks to Volchy and the navigator, we did eventually get there.

The hotel turned out to be beautiful; we were given a room on the 4th floor, spacious, with a large window and even two desks. We really wanted to sleep, so we took a shower and lay down. We thought we’d sleep for a couple of hours, but we slept until evening and woke up only when it was pitch dark outside.

We were hungry. We went out onto the street hoping to find something to eat. In Thailand there are plenty of stray dogs, which become active at night and bark at passersby. A bit scary. Here too dogs wandered the alleys, some still not recovered from the heat and lying down. Still, we decided to go in search of food and headed toward the main road, where we found a nice, clean place where many Thais were eating.

We tried Tom Yum soup — sour and very spicy, with vegetables and pieces of chicken. It vaguely reminded us of borscht. We managed to eat it somehow, though we didn’t like it. The soup itself was probably well prepared, but it was far too unusual for us.

We didn’t feel like sleeping. At 4 a.m. we were promised a free taxi from the hotel to the airport. Volchiy was working, and I was setting up the computer to work. We never did go to bed. At 4 a.m., as promised, a little car arrived and took us to the airport…..