We were alternating: One day of tourist attractions, one day of doing blissful nothing, back to a bad conscience and tourist attractions. With that goal in mind, time flew by. Saturday was our last proper day in Bangkok so we better had to get out there to see something. However, we were detained until almost lunch time by the fact that we needed to wait for our shipping agent to show up at the guest house to for the bike’s shipping in cash.

The Lonely Planet recommended the Jim Thompson house quite warmly and we kind of felt like another museum type thing. Getting there was a bit of a mission as you are just cattle for the taxi drivers who refuse to turn on the meter on a regular basis. Or ask for a 100 baht tip in advance. All in all, taxi drivers in Thailand are no fun and you always have to keep an eye out. But you can’t completely control things. So we were sitting in the cab with the meter running while the taxi driver just drove so slowly that he would get his 100 baht in the end even with the meter. *sigh*

We got out at one of the consume temples aka big malls before we realized that food there is really rather expensive. So we left again, wandered the streets until we came to a vegetarian restaurant with okay prices. From here, we walked the rest of the way back to the Jim Thompson House.

Jim Thompson was an American who settled in Thailand after the second World War. He single-handedly revived the interest in hand-woven silks and traditional Thai patterns. His house which is mostly a museum by now is formed by combining six traditional mahogany Thai houses, moved to Bangkok and reassembled in a way to create a large living space. Thai houses only have one room so by combining six of them, he got quite the estate. Then he went on to collect art in all forms which now, you can look at in the original setting.

The place itself is beautiful, set in a lush garden and full of tourists. About every 10min, a guided tour through the house starts. Naturally, we had picked the English tour which was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because the tour was really quite good and you got a lot of information but a curse as we had to suffer through the culturally inappropriate behaviour of an older couple from Oregon. First of all, they were really outspoken, as in they just asked all the questions that popped up in their minds. Learning is a good thing. But when it came to “yeah, but where were those muslim people originally from? They were not Thai, were they?”, it started to go down into a bit of a rabbit hole and ended with the lady correcting the poor guide’s English (it was good for f***’s sake). At the end, when our guide bowed with the hands in front of her, the gesture was repeated by the American lady who then went on to clutch the guide’s hand (such a no go…Thai don’t even shake hands) and continued her English lesson.

It was too much for us so we left pretty hastily to sneak back around to the guide afterwards to apologize for such a culturally inappropriate behaviour. We were not the only ones either as a black couple from New York basically did the same thing at the same time. They apologized for the rudeness of fellow Americans.

Trying to get over our “fremdschämen”, we now went to Siam Center where we had some delicious late afternoon ice cream before heading over to Siam Paragon which houses the big-ass cinema. Unfortunately, only Batman v Superman was screening so we refrained from spending money on that and went home instead.