Bangkok rocks. I could have stayed there at least a week. Its huge and has lots to do and see. It will all have to wait for another day though as we are at the airport en route to Koh Lanta, an island in the south.
We didnt meet many people at the hostel we stayed at, which was unusual. There were only two other people staying there. But, we talked to enough folks elsewhere to make what we felt was an “informed-enough” decision to head south to this particular island. We'll see what this place turns out like in real life. Hopefully it will be closer to an “island paradise” than the island we were just at that shall not be named.
We're leaving Bangkok now because King Rama the 9th’s birthday is tomorrow and judging from the larger-than-life portraits of the king that are virtually everywhere you look around Bangkok (they’re only recently put up in prep for his 88th birthday), its going to be a big deal. Penny loves a birthday, but not enough to be trampled apparently, so we decided to cut out the day before the massive celebration.
Our hostel is within a half hour walk of Khao San Road which is the main tourist drag in Bangkok. Its actually pretty cool as far as tourist drags go. Probably the most fascinating thing there (besides the coconut ice cream thats served in a half coconut) was to see people there selling fried bugs to eat-- everything from grasshoppers to scorpions to tarantulas and everything in between. Apparently the scorpions on a stick are popular. We met a woman who had just eaten one and said they taste like licorice. She was eyeing a large cockroach next.
On our 2nd day in town, I let myself be dragged to a thai cooking class, which I'll let Penny describe (she promises to upload to the blog later today). After that, we stopped at a bookstore to reload on books (the used bookstores I saw had a great selection-- beatnik backpacker hippie type stuff like Eckhart Tolle and Hunter Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut etc).
Later we went on a night bike tour of the City, which stopped at all the major tourist attractions like the Kings Palace, Wat Pho, Reclining Buddha Temple. The temples and stupas here have serious bling— the exteriors are bedazzled with porcelain plates from China and colored glass (small as a tic tac to as big as a silver dollar) and lots of gold-colored mirrored glass squares.
The tour also stopped at The Flower Market, which took about a half hour to walk straight through without stopping. Hundreds of kinds of cut flowers and some really exotic looking ones. Heaps of flowers and flower buds were mounded everywhere. I just wanted to to run and dive into one. I guess all the hotels and temples and restaurants go there to buy flowers and flower arrangements in bulk.
The tour also stopped at a public park where some guys were playing a game which looked like a cross between volleyball and hacky-sack. It was played with a wooden wicker (?) ball the size of a cantaloupe. The game was played like volleyball but you couldn’t use your arms or hands. The guys were really good and were spiking the ball over the net with their feet (the net was volleyball height).
Day 3, Penny was off on yet another tour and I stuck around Bangkok and roamed around on my own. I took a bus to the downtown and caught the sky train (think Bart) to the central pier and hopped on a ferry to take in the sights of the city from the water (the river runs throughout the city). Before doing so, I think I had the best Pad Thai of my life from a street vendor under the freeway for 15 baht (about 50 cents).
The river was full of all kinds of tug boats, barges, tourboats, water taxis, you name it. The water didn’t look particularly clean, but apparently it is full of fish, as I saw someone dumping some food into the water and seconds later, the water was boiling like it was full of piranha. After a tour on the boat, I jumped off the ferry near Khao San road and grabbed a Chang beer (Thai equivalent of Budweiser) at a street side cafe and people-watched for a while.
Then I found a temple down a back alley whose exterior was being cleaned and restored. A few thais were detailing all the exterior bling. They were using tools the size of a toothpick to do this— super detail oriented. Also one of the ornamental, what I’ll call “wisps” (but there may be another word for it), from the roof was being replaced and I got to see what a brand new wisp looks like up close (I got a picture too). It was a bunch of mirrored golden glass squares set in something that looked like brown rubber cement.
I went in and hung out at the rear of the temple for a while since meditation was going on and I took a breather while surveying all the big and small golden buddhas. Then I hiked back up to our hostel to meet Penny at 4pm.
That evening, we went out to explore the street vendors again to see what food treasures we could find. Strangely, all of the hawkers were covering up their carts and wheeling them away just as we got there (and it was prime dinner time). We were wondering what was up when one guy pointed at the sky. You couldn’t see anything up there except the glow of the city, but not even 5 minutes later, it was a torrential downpour. The rest of the evening was spent inside our room buying plane tickets, making reservations and packing up for our trip today.
