Bangkok

Arriving in Bangkok was like being slapped awake from a good dream. Cars, tuk tuks, and scooters flying through the hot streets following some secret laws (that superseded any signs or lines on the road), sickly cats and dogs wondering through the alleys and people offering to "help" scam you of money on every corner. This is my first time travelling overseas, but I get the impression this is pretty much par for the course in these major cities that tourists frequent.

As we settled in a little bit, we started to appreciate Bangkok a little more. The traffic actually did follow a pretty clear set of rules and was pretty civilized (people even flashed their headlights when they were about to overtake you in some illegal seeming fashion). People who approached you were usually there to scam you, but when people were approached they tended to be very friendly and have remarkably good English. The cats and dogs were still disgusting though.

We were in Bangkok twice on our adventure so far. We arrived there by plane and then came back after a week or so up north to drop Shan off for her flight. On our second visit we really started appreciating the city more as we got out of the Khao San Road area, where our hostel was and where tonnes of us tourists are, and visited the city more by public transit (including a really nice canal boat which got us out of the congested streets and onto a congested boat).

Highlights of our time in Bangkok include visiting many Wats (Buddhist temples), celebrating the Kings birthday (he's 83!), and visiting the area of town Shan had been staying in before we arrived.

The King and I (and Shan)

It turns out there are alot of Wats in Thailand. If I were to estimate, based on my observations, there are about eight Wat's for each Thai household. In Thailand's capital there were some really stunning Wat's including one with a really long reclining Buddha (shown below), one with a really tall Buddha (also shown below) and one with a jade Buddha (not shown below as we did not go there). The Wat's are all different (one of the things we now hope to take away from our time in SE Asia is a better understanding of the significance of various elements and images in the temples) but one thing they have in common is that they are extremely extravagant and pretty. Everything is gold or shiny red and green it seems like.

The Standing Buddha, it was actually a little underwhelming after we walked for an hour (with a very grumpy Meghan) to find this place.

The Reclining Buddha, very cool

The other big feature of our original stay in Bangkok was the Kings birthday. There was talk of it everywhere, including our flight into the city on Thai airways. There are also signs and posters of the King everywhere, but we came to realize that those are always there, not just during his birthday. During one of our walkabouts trying to find things in Bangkok (it turns out Bangkok is NOT a very walkable city, a sharp contrast to our time in New York. Much our time was spent walking past walled compounds and not finding what we were looking for) we came across the parade route for the King as well as a party street that included kids walking around dancing and singing, alot of food stalls and what appeared to be an electronics making competition (which I was particularly interested in, but Meg and Shan didn't seem to much care for). The highlight though was the nightly fireworks and then on the big day a huge set of fireworks and the release of paper lanterns into the air (they had candles in them which shot them up into the air like hot air balloons).

A bad picture but it shows how many of these flame filled paper lanterns were flying through the air (and crashing into each other) at the same time.

On our return to Bangkok we spent our last night with Shan over at her friend Joe's families hotel near the infamous Patpong street. The trip over from Khao San to Patpong gave us a chance to visit Bangkok's Chinatown which was really cool, with super narrow streets filled with every sort of useless thing you can imagine and packed with people and the occasional scooter. We also visited a big park near Patpong in which we got to see a large assortment of Thais doing aerobics to techno music, running through the park en mass, and some older fellows were even working out on some bars setup for the purpose. It was nice to see the healthy side of the city. Finally there was Patpong itself which we just walked through, but that lived up to the expectations one would have of a red light district in Thailand. We had several "menus" of sex shows thrown under our noses which induced feelings ranging from amazement, to disgust, to intrigue.

This is just a random picture. Meg sometimes gets up in my grill about taking photos without people in them, so I have decided to get into "photoshoping" the pictures to make her happy. This is my first (rather good I would say) effort.