Our flight out of Bangkok to return home left at 1 AM, but our internal flight from Chiang Mai landed at 11 AM (theoretically), so we would have one more full day to explore the capital.  We arrived bright and early at the Chiang Mai airport, and the coffee abundance continued – I counted 9 espresso machines and 5 gates in the section of the terminal where we were.

What we didn’t have was punctuality, so by the time the plane got to Bangkok and we found somewhere to store our bags, it was already well past noon.

Yeah, I got nothing.

Still, who wants to stay in the airport?  We wanted to go find one more restaurant that had been recommended to us before we left, and after that we didn’t have much of a plan other than wander around and see what we could see.

Oh, and it was around thirty, so not the most fun day for a lot of walking.

The restaurant in question is called “Sri Trat,” and is more of a fine dining establishment than most of the places we had been besides Rorsor.  One dish that everyone said was a MUST try was the barracuda salad with peanut brittle dressing.

Not only is this a must try, it is a “worth booking a flight to Bangkok just to eat.” The fish is cooked in vinegar, ceviche style, and then topped with a spicy Thai dressing full of, well, crushed peanut brittle.  It was EASILY one of our top-three dishes the entire trip.

Here’s a recipe if you want to try to make it at home – I’ve already done it once (with cod), and it was definitely in the ballpark.

The rest of the meal was excellent too.

The fruits in the cocktail at left are snake fruit, something I’ve never run across in North America at all, but they’re really tasty if you can find them – somewhere between a banana and a pineapple is how I’d describe it.

Lunch accomplished, we just moseyed around looking for other stuff to look at.  We found a small poster gallery at a nearby mall. The mall itself was already decked out for the traditional Buddhist holiday of (checks notes) Christmas.

We spent some more time just experiencing the insanity that is Bangkok.

And then we decided we wanted to do something a bit more air conditioned with our time, so we headed to the Bangkok Art & Culture Centre, a museum whose architecture was not so much Guggenheim inspired as “directly lifted.”

On the way, we encountered the definition of irony:

Yes, that’s a mall directory sign displaying a “not found” error.

There were a number of interesting exhibits at the art gallery, but two in particular caught our eye.  The first could best be described as “What if Keith Haring were the PR agent for the Illuminati?”

Sadly, we don’t have any pictures of that one, and I can’t figure out who the artist was, so you’ll just have to envision it.

What we DO have pictures of is the massive exhibition of an artist I’m kind of surprised isn’t better known in the west – Chatchai Puipea.  Dude doesn’t even have an English language Wikipedia page.

And yet the variety and sheer magnitude of works on display was really something.

If you’re into contemporary art, he should definitely be on your list to investigate.

From there, we wandered around to a few more nearby malls, including a sort of grubby one that reminded us a lot of Nakano Broadway in Tokyo, and then back to the food court of the mall where we had lunch on the very first day.

For our last proper meal in Bangkok, we had crab noodle soup with wontons.

For desert, we got smoothies, and then had to wander around the mall consuming them, because we couldn’t take them on the train back to the airport.  While doing that, we ran into what appeared to be a boy band giving a press conference about their new movie.

And because there’s no justice, these knuckleheads DO get a Wikipedia page.

Papparazzi popped, smoothies consumed, it was time to board the train and head back to the airport.  Thailand was amazing – we definitely want to come back at some point.  But interestingly, there will still be one more blog entry after this one.  Stay tuned…