A Trip to Bangkok

Last night Mark and I had an Exxon ex-pat get-together in Bangkok. (For those of you that have asked before, ex-pats are people that are ex-patriots of their respective countries.) It takes a lot of orchestrating to spend the evening out in Bangkok. Songran our driver had to pick me up at 2:30 to go and pick up the boys at school, then we had to drive back into Pattaya,(about 20 minutes of backtracking) to leave them with Molly and her boys for the night. Songran and I then drove to Sriracha to get Mark at work, we picked him up about 4:00. Traffic into Bangkok on a Friday night is really atrocious. We finally arrived to the Hard Rock Cafe of Bangkok at 6:30. It took an hour for the last 5 miles. We are learning a lot about patience. The streets are indescribably crowded with motorbikes weaving in and out of the cars inching along. If we lived in Bangkok we would have to become very familiar with mass transportation. We had questioned if we would even participate in the evening until we found out that Jimmie James, one of our dearest Exxon friends just happened to be in Bangkok the same evening and we would be able to see him as well. So we made the trek in. All of Exxon's ex-pats except 3 live in Bangkok working at the Thailand headquarters for marketing, legal council, treasurer department, planning and they have a large amount of people that work in the service department taking care of all Asia's credit card services, customer services etc. There were about 50 ex-pats at the party last night and a whole new group of Exxon people, most of our dealings have always been with refining and lubes employees. It was an enjoyable time of meeting lots of new people from all over the world. We did set across from a couple from New Zealand that had transferred from the Fairfax office just one week before us. They seemed to be adjusting well and sadly they were very glad to be moved out of the states, the wife especially didn't enjoy their three years in the US and didn't hold back in voicing all of her complaints. Apparently, they lived in a very stuffy area in Oakton with their kids attending the Vint Hill school, they are very happy to now be in Thailand. It was a fine evening with one of the highlights being the bean and cheese nachos!! We met up with Jimmie at 9 pm and drove to the Oriental Hotel which is supposed to be one of Asia's premier hotels. We had such a great time on the river enjoying our Mango Sticky Rice (really, really yummy!) and catching up. Jimmie and Mark started working for Exxon within a month's time of each other. We just marveled at the fact that we were having dessert on the river banks of Bangkok, Thailand-he being from Hitchcock, TX and us from Muleshoe. You may have seen him on TV, he has been one of the 'faces' of Exxon in some of their latest commercials and had a full page spread in the Wall Street Journal. He and his wife have always had a commuter marriage, she is currently living in Boston doing a year of teaching at Harvard with their two children and he lives in Fairfax at the moment. I've always been amazed that they can make it work. We spent last Christmas with them in their other home in Charlottesville. We saw him off to the river taxi and headed home with Songran. We finally arrived home at 1 am.

We picked up the boys this morning at 10 am and Molly and I were dropped off at the Pattaya International Ladies Christmas Bazaar where we had to work 1 1/2 hours taking entrance money at the door. I joined this group of about 350 International ladies a month ago and there are a ton of things to get involved with through the organization. They do lots of charitable things like food drops, work at the orphanage, once a month they do manicures and pedicures at a home for disabled women along with book clubs, tennis and once a month lunches out somewhere. It's a great way to get to know people quickly. It has been a fun weekend of making new friends and visiting with old ones too.