Blogless in Bangkok

There have been no blogs so far because Joe and I have ebola. Well, not really ebola. Just stupendous head colds that feel like a merciful death is all too near. We have barely left the hotel in the last three days. I lie about gagging and moaning piteously, and Joe goes out from time to time to fetch tangerine juice from a guy with a cart around the corner. This tangerine juice is a fluid of such citrusy tenderness and delicacy that you experience it as much like music as food. Maybe Rodgers and Hart's "Isn't it Romantic?" or "You are Too Beautiful." Oh, am I laying it on too thick too early in the trip? But what else have I got to do? In one twenty-four-hour period when I rarely got out of bed, I ran the entire score of Sweeney Todd through my head several times. But then I thought, Dick, this way lies madness!
Joe got the cold after I did---from me, it would seem---and while he feels crummy he is actually somewhat functional. He has been over to Peace House Travel to lay plans for our March Burma trip. He has obtained a visa for a side trip for him (but not me) to Varanasi, India. He was helpful when our old Peace Corps friend Jack Prebis arrived at the hotel late Tuesday night having left one bag in a taxi and his credit cards at home.
Our SE Asia trip this year is three and a half months long, so four or five days laid up is no skin off our backs. But we were sorry not to have spent more time with Jane Campbell Beaven, another old Peace Corps friend who is traveling with Jack in Cambodia---they left this morning---and who arrived in Bangkok last week. We did manage to have two happy days with her and our friend Poe Suwatchie seeing some of the Bangkok sights you never tire of revisiting: the Royal Palace with its fantastical gold spires; the emerald Buddha; the palace of King Chulalongkorn, an airy, rambling Victorian mansion made of teak that we could actually imagine living in. It is good to be the king. Jane stayed at the Oriental Hotel, that old posh institution which in 1925 Somerset Maugham was told to vacate. He seemed to be dying of malaria, and the manager told him his death would make the place look bad. Anyway, we got a look inside the Oriental and would have dined there had we not fallen ill. The Oriental, by the way, is running at a 40 percent occupancy rate. This time of year it should be 90 to 100. It's both the world economy and the political turmoil here. More on this sad, unnerving situation later.
Our plan is to continue to outlive our colds and head down to Hua Hin, where Poe and his partner Simon live, on Saturday. Several days at the beach should be just what the soothsayer ordered.