1st day in Thailand was like the 1st time a kid goes into a toy store

I made my Bonjour-Retirement grand arrival in BKK Jan 2014 via an "academic" connection with ABAC. The first day I was whisked around their Bangna site in their effort to make me the oldest-on-records undergrad student on their campus. (For 3-4 years? Look guys, I don't have that much time left!) Incidentally it was also the first day of BKK shutdown. I came down for breakfast in the hotel lobby and saw all these amulet-wearing farmers gathering outside. At the end of the day, the university staff brought me back to town, put me up in their teaching guest tower in Hua Mark and  pointed that I could walk out to the soi and get some food in the evening. It was the night market alright, but I remember for my first dinner I had to look hard for a shop with an English menu posted outside. 

 

Soi 24 quickly endeared itself to me to call it home and has remained so for the last 4 years, though I never started school at ABAC. After 4 months in the guest tower, and two month-long Thai beginner courses at Asoke later, I moved into a nice ("overpriced" by the local standard) residence building in the same neighborhood. I and a lady tenant neighbor used to shoot the breeze about where we would go next if we had to move. After a few rounds of playing BKK monopoly, we kinda sit up and nudge each other "but that means we'd have to leave here? (No, no we can't!)" She's now resettled in Europe, I'm glad I'm still here.

 

I went back home in the US last Xmas for an extended visit, and boy, even good old Southern California  could be a dreary place when situation got beyond your control: monthly rental of a windowless hovel of a room half the size was more than double that of my "deluxe" BKK adobe, and the food court in Little Saigon supermarkets had all the fun of a mausoleum. I kissed the tarmac when the plane brought me back to Swampy. The first day back in Thailand was so infinitely better (and sweeter) than the first "first day" that for the first time in my life I had the urge to go do tambuon at the wat next door, I mean, soi.