In Bangkok the cafes and shops are in full Christmas mode, with carols playing over speakers, plastic Christmas trees with piles of wrapped presents, tinsel, and giant electric snow globes showering styrofoam snow which looks very out of place in semi-tropical heat. In Ambon, where we were only last week, they went in for far more abstract Christmas trees, like stencils made of metal wire. There was one more northern Christmas decoration: something that was clearly originally a very large plastic snowman, but whoever put it up thought it was a fat white seabird so had attached a beak to its nose, and it ended up being tropical after all.
We went for a special dinner, one the GF had booked as a surprise for me months in advance. Bangkok is a sophisticated place when it comes to dining, far more than Istanbul, say (nice though the food is there, and though I risk a spot of force majeur for ingratitude, but it’s true), and this was an extremely stylish place, a sort of chef’s table which specialises in digging up old recipes from old Thai cookbooks and serving them up on a counter with abotu six diners. The chef, who got progressively more drunk over the course of the evening was also a very pleasant fellow and at one point pulled out a mineral water bottle filled with homemade banana moonshine, which he hadn’t managed to get a permit to distil and sell, so he gave it out for free. I choked on it, being a lightweight. The food was delicious, really amazing. Refined, full-hearted, expertly prepared.