thailand 1/17: sukhumvit; soft-shell crab

The flight was four-hours and forty minutes long. I craned my neck for an aerial view of Bangkok before landing, but only caught the tropics edition of standard airport-vicinity sights, some sparse palms and deltas reflecting light under the setting sun.
The airport was apparently new. It gleamed with the blithe care heaped upon the recently acquired. I grinned sort of stupidly through customs. I harbored a small, thrilling fantasy of Chuck – a hunched, sneering vision in popped collars – greeting me at the gate, which didn’t pan out. (The latest romantic chimera slain by sedulous, unremorseful financiers) My first purchase in Thailand was a telephone call. Chuck, whose voice sounded harried but wonderfully familiar, instructed me to call a cab to the hostel, and to wait for him there. I disobeyed him, and took a bus instead. I ogled the foreign landscape as we careened at breakneck speed towards civilization. Thoughts of death laced curiosity, like grenadine, but it was without incident that we reached soi 38, a tributary of the bantam boulevard Sukhumvit on the eastern periphery of the densest part of the city.
I spotted Chuck before I saw the sign for the hostel, and rushed into the hello. He eyed my backpack, waited for me to check in, and announced that he was going to take me to a nice dinner.
“I’ve lost my mind,” I gushed as I clamored into the passenger side of his gunmetal green Carrera. I spoke ravenously about the last six months in English, which had been shelved since arriving in Shanghai. We were headed to the Four Seasons Hotel. There, we feasted, over an hour, on tangy catfish fritters, chili ground chicken and soft-shell crab.
Chuck has always been astonishingly easy to converse with, which is something I suspect he prides himself on. I gave him the skinny on everyone from Amherst. He expressed surprise, or dismay, or guffawed at the right bits. That Chuck, endowed with a wicked little wit, laughs when we chat, is richly rewarding. We ran into a couple of his friends having drinks, stylishly, in the candlelit lounge on our way out. I felt a little coarse in cargo-pocket pants and a tired wife-beater. He dropped me off at Sukhumvit, where I, not ready to retire just yet, took a stroll before hitting the sack.