The day started the night before when I decided on a whim to take a ride with a Gojek delivery guy for 150K. I helmeted up and hopped on, and Ut took me around a few of the districts in the cool and dark. We ended up at a café, drinking cacao and beer and tea before he dropped me back at my hotel. I’d agreed to take a city tour with him for three hours the next morning for 500K – about $21. The reason my day started the night before, is that after self-medicating with caffeine from both tea and cacao (had a shot of espresso), I didn’t sleep much. I got up (there’s an Up flavor!) early and decided to try a run. For the first time in a while, I was able to push out a few Ks (only did 4) pain-free. That’s another Big Up flavor.
While we were people watching and drinking more cheap beer, a man sitting at the table in from of us turned around and slurred some odd questions and gave us quite the monologue of why his life is a disaster. For one thing, what kind of schmuck gets deported from Thailand? He is one of the people in far-flung parts of the world that give the rest of us hopefully decent and conscientious traveling Americans a really bad name. On top of it all, man, that dude was strange.
So, to give the tl;dr:
- Up: my tour with Ut, a pain-free morning run
- Down: Bony butt pain, and a legitimately bad, and hopefully forgettable massage
- Left: So many left turns. So, so many
- Right: See above
- Strange: One drunk, or drugged, American
- Charm: Mark and Marta
There needs to be another flavor of quark though, called Amazing, which would be the flavor for the time Marc, Marta and I had together. Fleeting, yes. Amazing? Definitely and probably all the more because it was so random to meet, connect, share, and separate in only a few short hours.