20 minutes til boarding

I have a pretty good sense of direction, and I tend to find my way back to where I started without much fuss. Sometimes I even find myself back there without intending - just wandering about and getting the lay of the land. When I set off in search of the last few items on my list, I assumed this would be the case again. Worse comes to worse, I can just back-track, right? Well, that may have worked if I hadn't taken a turn into a bazaar down an alley. I felt as though I was going in the correct direction to intersect the street I'd come from when I came to a street that ended at a perfect circle with streets intersecting it from five different directions. Since I was already about what I estimated as a couple miles off my original route, I had to say it again, 'I am so screwed.'

I took a chance and picked one, knowing that none of them were striaght and could potentially lead me anywhere. I had almost three hours until I had to be back at the station, so why not? Then the dark clouds came rolling in along with some fairly intimidating thunder. It started to rain a little, so I asked one of the policemen standing outside one of the numerous temples which way I should go to get back to the train station. Although he pointed me in the proper direction and I was not as far off as I'd thought, the downpour intensified and I got stuck under a staircase connecting the temple with the sidewalk on the other side of the street. I tried to cross so I could get under the awning over there, but traffic was too heavy and standing at the curb was just getting me drenched by the cars splashing water from the gutter. When I finally got across, a tuk-tuk driver managed to get me to agree to pay him 40 baht to drive me just over a mile back to the station - highway robbery. When we got there, it was so congested that I had to walk the last block. I must have been a sight - soaked from head to toe and grumbling. I retrieved my bag and changed into some dry clothes in the shower room (10 baht for the shower room). Did I mention that I didn't get any of the stinkin' items on my list? Yeah, I'm over it.