Cruise Planners on the Road - South East Asia - Bangkok - Day #1 Continued and Day #2 - Erawon Shrine Update

Afternoon of our first full day here in Bangkok was all about seeing some of the city's major shopping centers along Sukhumivit Road - the longest road in Thailand - runs all the way to the Cambodian Border - and ostensibly one of the longest roads in the world.

Our hotel is on Soi 1 - this is a way to designate cross streets along Sukhumvit - our goal the first afternoon was Siam Center - an upscale shopping and restaurant area.  We choose to walk - first because we wanted the exercise and two, because we thought taking a taxi might be expensive.  Turns out there is a third option (BTS - skytrain) as well.  The walk was easy enough if you don't freak out having cars turn into you on pedestrian green lights - they will miss you but you will never get across unless you take your right of way.

Update*** - It was on this walk along Sukhumvit Road that we came upon the Erawon Shrine.  A Buddhist celebration was on-going with locals burning incense, being blessed, and dancers dancing.  Little did we know that 4 days later, a bomb would destroy the beauty and peace we had found at this urban oasis.

Erawon Shrine

Busy Intersection next to Erawon Shrine

Watching worshippers at Erawon Shrine

Total distance was around 2 miles of walking each way - easy walk along decent sidewalks - but do watch your step since it can be a bit uneven at times.  Center World itself is quite an edifice - 7 stories of stores and restaurants beautifully turned out and full of goods.  We ended up eating in Nara - one of two in the city - food was very tasty - Valerie is already craving another meal of brown pineapple fried rice with chicken.

A world about prices...  Nara was very reasonable from a US perspective - 44 dollars for lunch with two glasses of nice red wine, two bottles of mineral water, a chicken satay appetizer, and a main each - green curry with shrimp for me, the brown pineapple fried rice for Val.  All nicely prepared and tasty.  As we are finding out though, this was a relatively expensive meal for a large urban mall in the Sukhumvit area - compared to Terminal 21 shopping center where we ate at Thai Thyme (Italian Thai) the next day - the food price at Nara was double for lunch.  Then if we go more local Thai, which we did for dinner on Day 1 -- Nara's cost was 5 times what our total dinner meal was with two beers, two waters, and two Thai seafood soups in a loud fish market/restaurant that looked like a open warehouse.  So the cost scale here seems a wee bit wider than what we are used to at home.

Speaking of differences...  Let's talk about taxis...  We thought we were being healthy and economical by walking rather than sitting in traffic in an air-conditioned taxi...  Wrong!  We heard first from our tour guide, and then from a Romanian born, Los Angelino ex-pat we met in Thai Thyme that taxis are all metered (no made up tourist fares) and approximately 1 dollar - 30 baht - for a 30 minute ride.  We haven't taken a cab yet but with prices like these, we wouldn't hesitate for a minute to do so -- they are according to our local sources, clean, safe, and efficient.

Our second day was reserved for a whirlwind 6 hour private tour with a guide and driver.  We hit the three main tourist sites - the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, The Canals, and Wat Po.  Our guide Darin (a lady) was very knowledgeable and spoke functional English if you were patient and willing to listen hard to decipher her accent.  For the 4000baht ($114 USD) we paid each, all of our entry fees to the Grand Palace, Wat Pho, and Wat Arun, along with our canal rides and ferries for the 6 hour trip were included.  We learned a lot about Bangkok, Thai government and the country's history.  All of the places we visited were fairly busy with a mix of Thai and foreign visitors but were still easy to get around.  We drank a lot of water along the way since it was close to 100 around noon - humidity was not excessive by South Florida standards but heat is heat.  If you have never been to a Buddhist country, the temples (Wats) in Bangkok are exceptionally clean and well maintained and thus a great place to see architecture and religious history we are not generally familiar with.  The canal tour which connected our Grand Palace visit with our Wat Arun visit was really nice - we had a long boat all to ourselves and spending about an hour along the canals was a nice way to cool off after cooking at the Grand Palace.

After Darin and our driver dropped us off at Terminal 21 Shopping Center, we proceeded to the recommended food court inside on the 5th Floor.  Since we are not "buffet" people, we looked around at the regular restaurants and very happily settled on Thai Thyme - Italian fusion cuisine with two Singha drafts.  When we were done with our meal - mushroom risotto for Val and thai green curry risotto for me - we had a half mango, sticky rice desert with sweet coconut milk - sublime...  That's when we got to talking with "Dee" a former Los Angelino who originally emigrated to the USA from Romania.  Now retired, he has been spending major parts of each year living in Thailand for the past 11 years and was a font of knowledge about Thailand and what it is like to like here.  It is so interesting to get the perspective of someone who has been living here for a while who can put things in terms of what you would expect in the USA and what you will experience here.  Fascinating chat over a couple of glasses of wine and good to know we have someone we can write with questions for future visits.

So all in all, our second day in Bangkok was definitely tourist centered but it seems we are learning a lot in a short period of time.  We are still loving our Ariyasomvilla Hotel - beautiful property, great breakfasts, and staff - it may be at the end of a slightly seedy street, but you can overlook this in the short cab ride to and from the hotel's front door.

Saturday is moving day so after breakfast, we will get everything back into our bags and re-weighed (thanks to portable baggage scale Tanya provided) to ensure we make our 44lbs limit for our checked bag for today's Bangkok Airways flight ( a bit over an hour flying time) to Siem Reap (Angkor Wat) where we will spend the next two nights.  Tomorrow's big adventure is an all day tour of the temples of Angkor Wat - can't wait to compare these temples with the ones we saw here in Bangkok.

Until tomorrow then...

Grand Palace #1

Grand Palace Guard

Beautiful temple

Beautiful Tourist at Grand Palace - appropriately covered

Preparing for changing of the guard at Grand Palace

Grand Palace #2

Grand Palace #3

Embark point for private canal boat trip

Temple along the canal

Water highway signs

Demon guarding Grand Palace entrance

Grand Palace #4

Grand Palace #5

Grand Palace #6

Wat Arun entrance

Wat Arun under renovation

Beautiful tourist getting some sun

Entering Wat Pho

Head of Reclining Buddha

People provide some scale of how large the Buddha is

Like Venice, Bangkok is sinking - top of Buddha's head is now touching ceiling

Some of the hundreds of smaller Buddha's at Wat Pho

Valerie contemplating Peace and Serenity

Wispy gold spires reaching the clouds

Golden Buddha at Wat Pho

Terminal 21 - multi-story shopping center and restaurant location off of Sukhumvit Road

Meeting with a Los Angeles Refugee in Terminal 21

Traveling the World... But While you are gone,,, "Trust but Verify" - Petsitters...

I am sure that like us, many of you, have fur babies you have to leave behind when you travel the world.  Some have favorite boarding places, others have pet sitters who bring your babies into their home, and then there are those, like us, who prefer to have their babies sleeping on their own beds while we are away.

If you have a live-in pet sitter, you are placing a special kind of trust in someone -- first, that they will love and take care of your babies, and secondly, treat your home and your belongings like their own. When the sitter is family or a close family friend,  you never wonder -- but when you are hiring someone to provide a service in your home,  how do you deal with the question of "Trust but Verify"?

In our case, our home came with some automated features,  key among which is our digital, networked, keyless entry system.  While ours is a Schlage lock equipped for Nexia networking, there are other companies that provide the same kind of capabilities.  https://www.mynexia.com/login
First and foremost is the ability to establish multiple, named entry codes - e.g. Pet Sitter - Linda or Pet Sitter - Frank. With named entry codes, you know who and when someone enters your home.  Second, let's say your pet sitter lost or forgot their code while you are away?  All they have to do is text, email, or call you and you can let them in or lock the door while they are standing there by using your (in this case) Nexia app on your smart phone.  So this is one way to audit comings and goings.

The other way is by installing a wired or wireless video camera.  In our case, we bought a Drop Cam Pro and installed it to monitor comings and goings in our front drive way -- we specifically choose not to monitor things inside our home - with hacking the way it is these days, who would want to find out their daily lives are a new, live, HD reality show complete with audio?  Like our door lock, the camera is also available for viewing on our smart phones, laptop, or ipad.  Lastly, if you want an auditable record of your recorded video, you can purchase cloud storage -- which we did -- to ensure you keep a record of things. https://www.dropcam.com/dropcam-pro

So my reason for writing this blog entry at this time is that we just got back from a short cruise.  Our pet sitter is someone we have used before who really seemed responsible and loving with our pets.  This time, like last time, we took a quick look back home before leaving our INet connection in port, except this time - less than two hours after our leaving home, our pet sitter had left and not returned for more than 7 hours...  This was most definitely not part of our agreement!  Now the alarm bells are ringing and my wife is just about ready to get off the ship and head back home to rescue her babies.

Of course it got worse -- at our first port the next day -- we reviewed the video and door events finding that she'd been gone 8.5 hours and when she returned it was with another couple (also not agreed to) who brought two additional dogs into our home (our cat was really freaked when we got back).  Turns out,  everyone had a sleep over that evening and over the next 4 days it was more of the same.  Wow - now we were wondering what had gone on the first time we used her and just did spot checks without recording while farther away in Europe???

At the end of the day, our dogs and cat are happy now that Mom and Dad are home -- they ate like they were starved and the cat came back out from under the guest room bed after 30 minutes of patient mommy coaxing.

But how do you handle it?  I don't know if we are right or wrong but did not disclose beforehand that our door lock maintains an audit log, nor the fact that we monitor our driveway with a recording video camera.  Nor did we disclose it when I talked with our pet sitter when we got home.  All I said is that we have an extra-ordinarily close neighborhood -- which we do -- and neighbors across the street and on each side, who are friends and know our comings and goings.  The names, addresses, and phone numbers of our neighbors are part of the information we leave with our pet sitters so they have someone to reach out to if something comes up.

Despite knowing this, someone we trusted, left our dogs locked in the house for extended periods of time with 1-2 additional dogs, while people we'd never met were sleeping over in our home.  When gently confronted with these facts "gathered from observant and concerned neighbors..." our pet sitter immediately admitted screwing up and apologized profusely  -- she was profoundly shaken by having lost someone's trust so completely.  We won't hire her again but we aren't blasting her name and phone number across the internet because we believe she has learned a valuable lesson.

For our part, we will continue to use these tools as we travel the world, and ensure that before we leave our home in the care of the next pet sitter, we will have a discrete understanding about how long they can be away, where the pets will be while he or she is away, whether or not other people can visit (and for how long), and whether or not other pets can be introduced into the home while Mom and Dad are away.

Over and above the safety of your pets and security of your home, there are additional considerations you need to think about -- especially if you live in Florida.  Many in Florida have pools in their backyards and over the years, enough kids drowned in these pools to require stringent safety legislation.  We don't have young kids so as soon as we had the final inspection of our new pool, we took off the door alarms that squawked every time we opened our sliding glass doors.  We don't have young kids nor grandkids so we weren't being negligent with respect to protecting our pool since it is completely enclosed with locked doors -- so the only way to the pool is through the home's (un-alarmed) patio doors.  But let's say your pet sitter invites friends with kids or their grand kids over to your home while you're away?  Guess who's going to be liable...

So Trust but Verify while you're Traveling the World...