There was a shortish tour this morning to a place called The Prasart Museum. This museum seems to be the personal effort of one man (whose picture is on the Museum pamphlet but whose name I cannot find) to restore to Thailand, and display, historic artifacts, furniture and ceramics, collected and removed by other nations. Some of the photos below try to capture the nature and quality of those restorations.

After the tour, the group dispersed for free time and to prepare for our 17:30 checkout, and transport to Bangkok's new train station for our overnight trip to Vientiane, Laos. Nina and I used that time to rest and to visit the local shopping mall called Terminal 21. The place seemed to have an infinite number of clothing shops, a very good grocery shop, and Nina discovered that each floor was decorated to reflect a different famous city. One of the floors even had a London double decker bus and another floor had a San Francisco Golden Gate.

Maybe the lowlight of the day was the journey to the train stations. The first 200 meters of this minibus drive took 20 minutes. As the reader might be aware Bangkok has a reputation for some of the worst traffic in the world. Well tonight we got a demonstration of that reality. Never the less the journey was eventually completed at an average speed of below 10 km/hr and we arrived at the station with time to have dinner before boarding.

Dinner was being supplied and paid for by the local tour company and so while the group found seats in the food court our local guide collected food dishes of various sorts and delivered them to our tables. In this way the main course was followed up with coffee and donuts. Which in turn was followed by supplies for the overnight train journey; various kinds of biscuits, cans of coffee for the morning and more bottles of water than we could actually carry.

Thus ladden with an excess of supplies we found our way to the ticket-checking queue and eventually to the platform. Turns out the train was quite modern. We were housed in 2 person sleeping compartments where the seats converted to a one-up one-down arrangement. The cabin was in sleeping mode when we boarded so we wasted no time getting into bed.