Day 84: Nov 27: Happy Thanksgiving from Thailand!

The protest situation at the Bangkok international airport hasn't gotten better (though it still hasn't turned extremely violent at least), and what's worse is that we found that Mumbai had been attacked by terrorists. Thankfully, although one of our friends has been in and out of Mumbai for the last few months, he left some hours before the attacks began. We have so much to be thankful for!

We started the day off by sleeping late (the first time in a long while!), and when we did awaken, took our time over breakfast before staring the one thing on our list for the day (besides feasting): laundry. It was about darn time as it was since Tanzania that we've managed to do a substantial amount of it. We've been smelly for a while now (only Karla really)...but the good news was that Katie's apartment building has washing machines (a luxury!), and we were able to watch 'The Wizard of Oz' on her computer while we waited for our clothes to finish washing.

It took a while for us to hang all our clothes (no dryer), but we got inventive with the string and bungee that we'd brought and turned Katie's studio into a regular laundry line. Satisfied with our day's work, we left for lunch. We'd wanted to get a massage this afternoon, but unfortunately we couldn't find the hotel that offered this service, so we decided instead to reverse our day and take a tuk-tuk back to the Tesco Lotus (the Thai Costco).

At Tesco, we spent some time shopping for an egg-crate for Katie's bed (if she won't pamper herself, we've got to do it for her!), but the closest thing we could find resembled a grown-up, fluffy version of a baby's changing mat. We bought 2 to fit her king-sized bed. And two big pillows. Getting home in the tuk-tuk was quite amusing...

We stashed the stuff in the laundry room, then called Katie to let us in. Luckily she works about 2 min away (on foot), so we met her at school and took a quick jaunt to the hotel so we knew where we were going, before she let us into her apartment and she was on her merry way. We set up her new fluffy bed, then headed back out.

Our massages were delightful. Cheaper than the ones in India, these masseuses knew what they were doing...after an hour we felt limber and relaxed. Just what we needed after carrying our backpacks all day yesterday!

We trotted back to Katie's, feeling like a billion bhat. We gathered our things, and walked over to Katie's friend Mike's house (literally across the parking lot) for Thanksgiving dinner. It wasn't exactly traditional, but it was delicious: we had French toast, pancakes (with real maple syrup!), omelets, sliced deli turkey with cranberry sauce and fruit salad. For dessert we had ice cream, chocolate cake, and cookie dough. We had a lovely little ex-pat crowd of a Canadian, a Brit, a handful of Americans and a couple of Aussies. But just having breakfast food again was a treat!

After dinner and some hilarious conversations, we headed back to Katie's. After a couple of Thanksgiving phone calls from families, we did what is appropriate for Thanksgiving evening: we kicked off the Christmas season by curling up in Katie's bed (in loose pants!) to watch 'Love Actually'.
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