Breakfast: Small muffin grabbed from the hotel buffet.

Lunch: Fruit from the floating market about an hour outside of Bangkok. Fresh and fried bananas, mango, pomelo and rambutans!

Cocktail: Went on the Marriot's happy hour boat cruise thingy, had a Singapore Sling and some assorted little munchies which they provided.

Dinner: Went out wandering up and down the street, guesstimate I walked about a mile round trip... was thinking of grabbing something grilled on a stick from a street vendor, but instead I just kept going, in part because I was unsure how to conduct a transaction in a language I don't understand a word of. (save for maybe "tom yam goong" and "pad thai"') I realized that in Tokyo, and even Viet Nam to some extent, I had a decided advantadge over my present situation. Shit, I could barely even remember what fish sauce is called in Thai earlier this afternoon. (it's "nam pla", I eventually recalled)

Eventually ended up coming back by the hotel, and after realizing my PDA was an hour ahead (still on Singapore time) and that I had an hour or so before the restaurants in the little attatched mall closed, ducked into one, embarassingly sweating profusely after my little exercise session. The big flipbook picture menu outside was replaced by a much more extensive, and slightly bewildering, menu once I was seated. Decided on a "shake with watermelon", which was actually more of a watermelon juice slush, very nice... and an order of fried squid and morning glory flower salad with an order of steamed rice. It was quite excellent and very much reminded me of a dish I used to get at a little Vietnamese place named Asiana up on Clark Street in Chicago. They did thiers with eggplant, but the approach and taste was somewhat similar... with the eggplant (not sure what specific kind they used) fried in a light, crispy, tempura-like coating and served with a healthy drizzling of sweet and slightly spicy fish sauce. Wonderful stuff.

Like with the Hong Kong dollar, I'm having a bit of difficulty wrapping my head around the Thai baht to US dollar conversion equation, or at least difficulty doing it in my head, but doing the math now it looks like my dinner cost about $3.80 US. (157 baht) Not a huge dinner by any means, but certainly very reasonably priced.