there's a tesco in suphanburi but i haven't seen one in ayutthaya

i got the magical mystery tour bus to ayutthaya. it was bright orange with bits of yellow and blue on the front and then inside it had yellow, red and blue go-faster stripes going down the ceiling from front to back and there were yellow garlands hanging around the driver's mirror (for the king, presumably). oh, update on the yellow tshirt phenomenon - according to the bloke that took us to erawan waterfall, it's for the king and it was the king that was born on a monday, not buddha. they're well into their king out here. there's random golden framed portraits of him in the streets.

but anyway, this bus. we had all the windows open and there were rotating fans on the ceiling and the whole experience made me feel like i was getting a trip back to the seventies. and it was all so easy. the bus left kanchanaburi within 10 minutes of me getting there and then the bright yellow bus in suphanburi to ayutthaya, again, set off within about 10 minutes. no worries. though the second bus seemed to take an age to get there. i was just getting to the point where the look-at-me-i'm-on-a-foreign-bus novelty was rapidly wearing off when we arrived. and i got a marvellous room with queen size bed, en suite, air con, telly and fridge for about seven pounds fifty a night. again, no worries. all those ayutthaya rumours are lies, lies.

i decided that i wanted to do something normal so i wandered around the local street market and bought a bangkok post and ducked into a local cafe for a singha beer. i was engrossed in my paper, telling me that there were planned pro-democracy protests in bangkok - that'll be fun if i get caught up in that - when i noticed that they had closed the door of the cafe and the sign said closed. there were people inside but it looked like they knew the owner and i thought maybe i should go. as i was getting up to leave, a chap sat down at the piano and asked me if i could play. i said i used to play when i was little. he said he had been learning for three days and started playing the tune that tom hanks plays on the big piano in the film 'big' and invited me to join him. so there we were, bridging our cultural differences, hammering away at the old joanna. he then taught me how to play a traditional thai song, 'the earth cries', which is mostly on the black keys. apparently, most thai songs are on the black keys cos they're all wistful and melancholy. in return, i taught him how to play 'chopsticks', seeing as i'd totally forgotten all the proper tunes my dad had taught me. not exactly showing him the best that classical western music has to offer but he seemed to think it was good so that's alright then. his name was 'R'. thai people have a name and a nickname and R is his nickname. salissa's nickname was 'pun', i think, meaning 'apple', hence 'apple's guesthouse'. anyway, after we'd made sweet music, a young girl who turned out to be some kind of hulahooping genius turned up. she was only about six but, bluddy hell, she was good. she wupped my ass in the impromptu thai hulahoop championships, 2007. and her mum and auntie (probably) were there and she did a performance on the hulahoop with them singing the song and her doing the actions. marvellous. felt like i'd learned a lot about modern thailand in that hour or two. and it was really nice cos i was walking back from the shop later and they recognised me in the street and waved. it made me feel at home. and then i was out wandering through the historical park today and bumped into R who was conducting a tour for some brits and he called me over to say hello. he started telling the british couple how we'd been playing the piano. it was most amusing, watching their confused faces. it's funny to be in a place so different in every way and yet have people recognise me in the street. my new thai bezzie mates.

i had to leave the cafe cos i'd booked to go on a night tour of a few temples. we got a tuk-tuk so see the temples that are lit up at night and they were v enchanting. it was good to see them by night and then appreciate them by day today. i walked round a few more temples today but i didn't go mad cos it was too bluddy hot. some people had gone the whole hog and hired bicycles so they could see everything. madness. but i enjoyed wandering and indulged in a bit more bartering at the tourist 'markets' just outside the main temples. i've got the hang now - you start off by looking at something you don't want so they don't know the thing you do want, then you get them to say a price, you ask whether that's the best price and they usually lower it, you then offer something below that and carry on until they agree to what you want to pay. the trick is to have some knowledge of how much things generally are. and i'm not scared of it now. yay for bartering.

the historical park in ayutthaya is most serene. it's a large park with ancient crumbling temples dotted around. it's a bit like rome in that respect, in that you keep stumbling across another ruin round every corner. but it's a great place to wander and you can see lots of examples of 'typical ayutthaya architecture' which seems to be central curved pillars ('prangs') surrounded by lots of 'stupas' which are shaped like giant hand bells. they're all brick here, maybe because they're ruins, unlike the ones in bangkok that are decorated with ceramics and shiny stuff.

so i've finished my day's sightseeing and shall perhaps head back to the moon cafe for another piano lesson. have yet to figure out how to get to sukhothai tomorrow but maybe pianoman can help with that, too. it pays to have friends, dunnit?