A quick visit to Lumpini Night Market. This is a quality night market, not your ma and pa holding a baby while cooking dead chook and a domestic pack of dogs looking on.
No, Lumpini is full of nice things and nice people. They sell quality, like the genuine Tag Heuer Cararra watch, I bought there tonight. Normally they sell at, maybe, $10,000, but I managed to bargain a seller down to $75. Janet swore I was being taken but men know these things and I was on to something hot.

However, after an incredible dinner for about $15, we kept shopping and the same watch appeared at other stalls. It was a period of great triumph for Janet as she discovered my watch could have been purchased for exactly half the price at most other places. She produced not so much a prolonged laugh but a victory bray and carried a smirk that suggested she had lost either her mind or her moral compass.

Her greatest moment of the day was when she waied (formal hands-together bow) to an 18-month old little Thai boy and he waied back to her, his fat little hands clasped together as he gave a solemn nod. After that, Janet was in heaven. The kids are so beautiful, so cute. Parents lit up when showing them to us and we smiled and talked happily with them, usually in exaggerated mime.

My saddest moment was watching from a taxi a beggar who had lost his arms. He held a plastic cup in his mouth, bobbing his head to passers-by to solicit coins. Nobody put any in, from where I could see over a line or two of traffic. Moments later, I saw a man lying on the edge of the footpath, one arm outstretched and also holding a cup for begging. Janet saw others at the markets on Sunday, one covered in scars from acid attacks, his face barely recognisable as a face and his body a mass of scar tissue, all pink and peeling as he sat haunched up in the full sun. I guess we had better get used to all this before we get to Cambodia and Vietnam, as it is full-on in those countries.