Saturday, April 9, 2011

Bangkok

So to get back to Bangkok from the islands we decided to do it like the locals and take a night bus.....pretty much miserable of course. Check out those sweet curtains though! And we are even showing the traditional greeting ("swati KA" - hello or "cumpu KA - thank you.) Took us a long time to get those down.
This is Koh San road which is the main hostel road and tourist center in town. Always bustling and crazy and fun.
We went to this huge weekend market..... I mean it was HUGE! We were there for 4 hours and didn't even see everything. We did get ourselves some excellent coconut ice cream.
Nice mannequin faces girls!
After having Thai food for breakfast, lunch and dinner for almost 2 weeks we were pretty stoked to have some good old American food. Thanks Mcy-D's! (Pretty sure the last time I ate there was last time I was out of the country....
We took a ride in a tuk-tuk which was necessary, but it was really crazy because the only way you can go somewhere in one is that you have to agree to let them take you to a jewelry store that give them a commission first.....we were super annoyed about it, but went anyway since that was the only way to ride in one.
The jewelry store actually turned out to be interesting. Here are all the people making the jewelry and they had really unique settings and things for the rings, so it was a fun pit stop.
The tuk-tuk dropped us at the Jim Thompson house. He is an American who was very influential in the Thai silk trade. He was an architect by trade and took 6 different Thai traditional homes and made this museum home for himself.
It was full of tons of really impressive Thai art. The home was really beautiful and all up on stilts which is how the Thai people would traditionally deal with flooding.

Then it was off to church......
Which was surprisingly hard - after walking forever we saw this tiny little sign and were so excited! Turns out they were showing conference so we missed the whole thing, but we were still really excited to find it!
After church we went to the Grand Palace




This is a mini sculpture of Ankor Wat in Cambodia


This is inside the main temple where you can see at the top of the altar the jade buda. No pictures were allowed in there since it is a holy place. Lost of people were there praying.
Outside all the Thai people were dipping these lotus flowers in this vat of holy water and touching themselves on the head. Some kind of a blessing I presume.

These are the guards outside one of the private buildings in the grand palace walls. That little boy took a picture with him and I didn't quite capture it but as he ran away he turned around and bowed and said "cumpu KA" so adorable!


On our last night there we decided it was time to get some last minute cheap pampering. Pedicures!
Then we headed to Salome Village where we saw a dinner show with traditional Thai food and dancing. It was really incredible.

The food was amazing of course!
Thai people sit on the floor of course - so they sort of made the tables like that but with a place you could let your legs hang for those of us not as nimble as the Thai people....
The costumes were very intricate and stunning.
The dancing was really cool to watch. It was only a little creepy because they bend their fingers back really far. It must be something that is culturally considered beautiful because you see it in all of their art work as well.... I just thought it was creepy.

The day we left we spent the morning at the floating markets about an hour outside of Bangkok. Traditionally this is how the Thai people did their daily shopping. Everyone on the river in long boats bartering and trading fruits and vegetables.
Turns out it is pretty much a place to sell tourist stuff, still pretty cool though.
It was alwesome to see all these little old ladies with their bamboo hats on steering these boats around.
Before we headed to the airport (with a taxi driver that we are pretty sure was drunk no less) we got our last stores of Thai fruit. So much better than ours somehow.
This is technically 36 hours later or something but we left Thailand at 5pm and got back to Cali at 8pm - crazy flight!!! Let me just say something about these ladies - amazing! We had such a wonderful time together and even being together 24 hours a day for 2 weeks we got along really well the whole time. That is pretty incredible if you ask me. We had a fantastic trip and I couldn't have asked for better people to travel with!

1 comment:

Reags said...

Where's more posts, come on!!!