Fire Eater

brown dog, originally uploaded by Dianthus.

Today was D’s first official day at the office, so we rose early and headed downstairs for breakfast. (Granted I think we were both up around 4, but managed to “sleep in” until 6…curse you jet lag!) The breakfast’s here at the hotel are great. Tons of choices. Do you want toast, cereal, miso soup, or noodles? Fresh fruit and juice everyday (guava juice….mmmmm…). The thing that makes it even better are the people who work here. They are so friendly and warm.
D had asked if I would come and meet her for lunch, so I spent the morning catching up on my blog entries, and some house related stuff. Soon it was time to walk over to D’s office. She had shown me a shortcut on Friday in my jet-lagged state, so I was hoping I would remember the way. The directions included markers such as, turn left after the blue tiles, turn left at the basketball hoop, and look for the school…well I found the blue tiles, and missed the basketball hoop. I ended up slightly lost, but discovered that the Soi I was on hit the road her office was on. I luckily chose the right direction in my fifty-fifty chance of left or right. Thank goodness for screaming children. D was outside waiting for me, and we decided to head back to Goodwill for lunch. D had the veggie Pad Thai and I had the Garlic Pepper Chicken. I’m not sure why but I was thinking pepper, like black pepper, on this chicken. So when our server put down this little bowl of a sweet vinegary sauce with pieces of chilies floating in it, my inner Homer Simpson came out “Doh!”. Chili pepper! I sampled a little on my first piece of chicken, and whoa man! another mouth-searing meal. My lips were burning, but the flavor was amazing. Lunch time here is at least an hour, so we walked around a little bit and picked up some pineapple and some green apple-like fruit from a vendor to snack on. The pineapple was delicious, but the green fruit was a bit to starchy for me.
During lunch D asked me if I would come back to her office and help her get her email set-up. Her new office tech person had left for vacation until after the New Year, so I agreed to come be mobile tech support. We got everything set up and I headed back to the hotel to chill while D finished some things up. She arrived about an hour and half later, changed clothes and we were off to see the boys! We made the trip with confidence after our Friday trip. The staff was happy to let us have some visit time with them and showed us how one of them had been chewing on their bed/pad from the kennel. It was another visit filled with wagging tails and lots of kisses. (The spotted dog is giving me the cold shoulder, showing D how much he loves her. He seems to blame me for the kennel ordeal...that dog!) After a sad goodbye, we hopped back on the Skytrain and stopped at the Siam Paragon food court for dinner. This time we ate at a place called ‘home work’ with the most mixed menu I’ve seen so far. It was an interesting blend of asian/Italian/traditional English meat pies. I debated between chicken with crunchy noodles and a chicken green curry pot pie, before settling on the noodles and D had a mixed green salad and French onion soup. I learned an important lesson with my meal; just because they look like red bell pepper, does not mean that they are red bell pepper. A few of the pieces were mildly spicy, but one had me in pain. I either will be eating fire by the time we come back or will have a huge hole in my stomach…