Day 321: That's so inappropriate

In the morning, we went out and walked around the back streets near our hostel looking in vain for somewhere to have breakfast. After a while we gave up and headed down the main road towards the sky train terminal. The girls' faces lit up when they saw those familiar golden arches – which they haven't seen since China – and we all went inside for the comforting familiarity of a McDonald's breakfast. 

We then bought our tickets and hopped onto the sky train for the short journey to Phloen Chit station. We were due to meet Luke, a Bangkok-based photojournalist whose stories I had published regularly in Geographical over the years but who I had never properly met. Having built plenty of fat into our schedule, we arrived very early, so we walked back up the road past the sky train station to a big mall called Central World, all the while swivelling our heads around to marvel at the big, modern skyscrapers soaring into the heavens around us, and marvelling at the appalling Bangkok traffic. We wandered around the mall for a while, heading discretely for the cinemas. Kate and I had quietly discussed the possibility of seeing a movie after lunch, and the girls noisily suggested that this would be a fantastic idea when we broached the idea with them. So, we checked the times and then, as it was nearly time to meet Luke, we headed back to Central Chidlom a big department store. He was just where he promised he would be and we all went up to the food court at the top of the store for a great chat and a lovely lunch. 

After bidding Luke farewell, we walked back down to Central World and bought tickets to Inside Out. While we waited for the session to start, we sat and watched the coming soon trailers and then walked around the food court filling up on the taste testers and grabbing some snacks for the movie. When we got into the cinema we were confronted by a screen of truly epic proportions and sat down in seats of quite spectacular comfort – and settled back to watch the trailers. The ridiculously age-inappropriate trailers. The first was for a gritty action film in which a young family is caught up in political violence in Malaysia. Err, look away now please girls. And keep looking away – the trailers that followed, while less an alarming mirror of our own situation, were equally action-and-violence-packed, a truly bizarre selection given that we were all waiting to see a kids' film. Afterwards, on the way back to the sky train, we stopped and looked down at a busy street-corner shrine, full of worshippers and tourists – a shrine that would become infamous a few days later when a bomb went off, killing 20 and injuring more than 120.

We caught the sky train back to our stop, stopped in at McDonald's so the girls could get some burgers for dinner and then walked back to the hostel, where I got a plate of noodles and a beer in the restaurant – a lovely, very cold beer.