This was actually our second official race day. The first was in South Africa, beginning in Pretoria and ending in Johannesburg. For several reasons it was not a good day for me so I had quite a bit of apprehension about racing in Thailand. As it turned out, it was amazing.
Clustered together with my team, we quickly scanned the list of tasks and began running. Our first stop was the bowling alley where Silas was elected to bowl a strike and take a picture of the screen. Meanwhile, Elizabeth and I ran off to the fruit market. We had 4 fruits to buy but had only their English names so we found a nice man in a business suit and interrupted his lunch to ask him to interpret. It was truly a blessing because the vendors in the fruit market definitely didn’t speak a lick of English.
We regrouped and were off by bus and skytrain to Nana where we had to find Amanda (the race coordinator) at one of the 3 local Starbucks. Once there we had to spend 20 minutes in prayer (and some elected to spend a little on caffeinated beverages).
And we were off again, headed by skytrain to Siam Paragon, the ritziest shopping mall I’ve seen in my life. It had every major designer plus many I’ve never heard of. The top floor even had Ferrari, Maserati, and Porche dealerships (how do they get the cars up there???). We had to take pictures in front of Gucci, Burberry, Versace and Maserati.
After running around for awhile, we finally located a mall photo booth and tried to tell the woman working that we only wanted one photo and we were in a hurry. No, thank you, we don’t need 5 poses. Just one please. Ten minutes and 18 photos later we rush out to get a taxi.
Next destination: Baiyoke Tower. With 82 floors its the tallest tower in Bangkok with a gorgeous view of the city. I didn’t actually see it, as we sent Silas running up to take pictures at both the top and bottom.
We had to do a little research at an internet cafe to discover that Sri Mariamman Temple is the Hindu name and the Thai’s actually call it something completely different. And off we go again, back on the sky train, then doing some serious powerwalking and finally arriving at the temple.
Two seconds later, after we’ve taken a picture in front of the sign (taking pictures of the temple is forbidden), we’re headed to Lamphini park to look for the duck boats. We negotiate with the people to let us sit on the boat and take a picture for free.
Grateful that no one fell in while piling in or out of the tiny boats we ran through the park to the night market.
One task left: find a native Thai wearing a “same same” tshirt. In Thailand, you don’t say things are “the same”; you say they are “same same”. Since we didn’t run across anyone throughout the day wearing the shirt, we got creative and asked the guy selling them to just hold it up.
Greeted by a cheering crowd of our loved-ones, the race ended. The winning team receives $50 for their ministry fund and choose another team to receive $50 for ministry. We came in second place (Concrete won) but they decided to give away their $50 to our team. We’re hoping to use the money to buy girls from the bars to take out for the night while in Pattaya. All in all, a very good, crazy fun day.
