After 20 plus hours of travel my parents, Dave and I made it safely to Bangkok. The flight was relatively painless as I, thanks to the ambien, was able to sleep for the majority of the 10 hour flight to Tokyo . Our four hour layover in Japan was even kind of fun. We had a great sushi meal and there were an unending number of duty free shops sporting all of the latest cameras and cell phones and plenty of strange dried fish and many other mysterious food items to keep us entertained. We arrived at our hotel a little past 1 am Sunday morning. It is set around an enchanting garden and serves organic vegetarian food grown on its roof so it provides a wonderful oasis away from the hustle and 100 degree heat of the streets of Bangkok. After having slept on the plane, everyone was awake and ready to go this morning. We had a jam packed first day and are now all completely exausted so I apologize for any incoherence! We started the day with a crowded ferry ride down the Chao Phraya River to take us to the site of the Grand Palace and Wat Pho (Wat=Temple). After thrwarting the numerous scammers, trying to tell us that the palace and temples were closed so that we would take a tour with them, we made our way to our destination and spent the morning with a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide who gave us more or less the entire history of the life of Buddha. We saw umpteen images and statues of the Buddha the majority of them gilded in gold which included the emerald Buddha (made from Jade) and the famous reclining Buddha (that is 46 meters long!!). The Wats and Palace were all incredible and hopefully we will have pictures up soon because I can not even begin to describe the beauty and detail. After lunch we took a very long (but much appreciated because of the AC) taxi ride to the Champansak weekend market. The market was HUGE and contained everything from silk scarves to puppies and all of the street food you could imagine. We made it back to the hotel with sore feet and took much needed showers before heading out for dinner. We checked out the infamous Khao San Rd, a backpackers enclave, before having a tasty vegetarian dinner from a crazy hostess who made costume change in the middle of our dinner. Now we are off to bed and have no idea what we will do tomorrow so you will just have to check back in later...
Jess
ps - Robs, you will be happy to know that the super trendy kids here in Bangkok call anything they think is cool "hipster." (that was Dave)
2 comments:
I'm so jealous... don't leave without trying the fresh squeezed orange juice and mango sticky rice from the street carts! ;)asia
these pictures are especially artsy and nice, although they they are all great (the waterfall looked so nice and i noted the millions of bats in the other picture). The food sounds too yummy, but i wanna hear about some weirder things, DAVE you better impress me by the end. i hope i'm coming up to the pictures of the elephants! luff luff
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