Bangkok Baijo Dinner

My dear readers,

Your traveling correspondent has been terribly amiss in his duties over the past month. I have been traveling, indeed, but failing to chronicle my exploits, some of which have been fairly noteworthy. The now routine 265 mile commute from my home in Snohomish to my new employment home in Salem OR does take up the time I might have used to communicate with you all, but that is no excuse. My intent was to journal my thoughts and experiences, and I have failed in my self-assigned task. Let me make amends!

I write this on Saturday morning, Oct. 6, from my hotel room in the Vic3 Bangkok Hotel. I arrived here just after midnight on Monday, Oct. 1. Tuesday I helped set up a trade show booth and generally hung around, and Wednesday through last night I have been manning the booth, talking to Thai people (and many others) about biomass processing, and doing little else. WSM has an employee here in Bangkok who is a Caucasian that speaks Mandarin and some Thai, who has lived here for 15 months, and knows the city well in terms of places to eat, where to shop for the best bargains, etc. He and I have been spending a lot of time together, as well as 2 folks from the Oregon Trade group sponsored by the State of Oregon. It has been fun, and productive.

One of the objectives I had when coming was to sit down and hammer out the final details for an order for one of our larger pieces of grinding equipment, along with ancillary components, which had an aggregate total value of about $740,000. The customer has been working with the WSM home office for quite some time to get this in place, and Chris, the local guy, has been smoothing things over, selling the value of the equipment, etc., and the customer has been asking lots of questions, and pounding on price (which is what they do here on everything). To make this long story somewhat short we signed the contract yesterday, and now we are off to the races to build this thing. Chris wanted to celebrate with a special dinner so last night 4 of us headed out into the teeth of a monsoon to find his favorite Chinese restaurant and drink some baijo (pronounced bye-joe), a Chinese liquor that tastes like gasoline. 

We took the train to the appointed stop and stepped out into a torrential downpour.  We had to go about 2 blocks through huge puddles which drenched our feet and the rain soaked us from above.  We ducked into a restaurant that was not unknown to him but wasn’t the objective one either, but the weather made that decision for us.  We sat at a round table with the ever-present glass Lazy Susan in the middle, Chris ordered in Chinese, a large glass bottle with a clear liquid inside appeared with a price on it of 3,000 baht ($100!), and the dinner was on!  We shared 8-10 dishes of different sorts including a delicious lamb stew, spicy tofu on rice, seaweed salad, sautéed bean sprouts with garlic, and dried beef.  There were others but I can’t remember them just now. 

Through this all we toasted our success with very small glasses of baijo chased with beer.  When the food was done the glass bottle was only half empty but we sat there talking, telling stories of the road, arguing over who won the presidential debate (which only 2 of the 4 had seen), and finished it off in about an hour.  I won’t say we were quiet while doing it, but the other patrons were respectful and I didn’t see any harsh looks or upset faces.  Amazingly I didn’t feel at all smashed, and we were able to negotiate the Bangkok train system just fine and made it home without incident.  Chris had received a message from his Thai buddies and left to join them, so one other guy and I made it back to the hotel at about 11 pm, at which time I fell into bed and straight to sleep.  I feel fine today, so maybe “The Good Stuff” which Chris called our particular bottle, actually was better than a kick in the head.

It is raining today, but only a sort of misty rain.  I have plans to visit the Open Market with 2 of the three guys from last night.  I just want to wander around and see the sights.