Crazy Bangkok

A day in Bangkok. What a whirlwind. We started off the day going to the cinema to buy our tickets for Pirates tonight. Over here its assigned seating to you have to come early. Three hours of AC, new movie, all for under $4 – I’m in. We seem to be staying in the newer part of town and so we got a taxi to go see the sights after our movie tickets were secured. We arrived at the Grand Palace only to find that you have to be wearing long pants or a skirt so we decided to come back. We hired a tuk-tuk (a motorized tricycle) to take us around to some of the sights. Our crazy old tuk-tuk driver gave us a ride for our lives. We were grabbing on for our lives while at the same time trying to cover our mouths in order to not blacken our lungs from the pollution. Apparently there is some week-long tourism deal in Thailand where if tuk-tuk drivers take their passengers to certain tourist shops they are given free gas cards. We first went to the giant Buddha temple and then off to a few stores.

After the stores we went to the Golden Temple. We climbed to the top for a view of the city. Fortunately it was a clear day and we could see the gray city with the random golden temple spire sticking up, and no, it wasn’t angel Moroni. In some reverence for Buddha all of these temples make you take your shoes off once you go in which makes the 200 degree stone surface under your feet seem to constantly heat up. So imagine us prancing around the Buddha statues, stopping briefly for an occasional picture. Well after we came down from the Golden Temple our tuk-tuk driver was nowhere to be found. Supposedly he got the gas card and was gone – free transportation though. We then found an actual taxi to take us back to the no-shorts Grand Palace. This guy had to stop at the shops as well. Coincidentally they were the same shops, making it a little awkward for us. We were again ditched, but this time it was after the jewelry store. We then came to our senses and found a METERED taxi to take us to the Palace. I think we paid less than $2 for the ride. But hey, the ones before this one were free! At this point we were all frustrated from scamming Thai businessmen, hot (high of 36 today), sweaty (I’m sure you can see the drops in our pictures), hungry and I’m sure dehydrated. We decided to go in the Grand Palace – “Buddha, this one’s for you!”

We had to ‘borrow’ pants and a skirt…hence the awkward looking attire in the pictures. The skirt might as well have been wool – it was roasting! So I decided to be a little edgy and create a fashion concoction of my own. The guards weren’t too happy but I got away with it until the very end aka…it was worth it! The temples and shrines were impressive, mostly because of their colors and size. These golden, colorful temples stick out among the slum-ridden, gray blanket over Bangkok. In some of the pictures you can see what I am talking about in the background. After walking around the Grand Palace for a while and only exacerbating the dehydration we grabbed a bright orange taxi and headed home. I should mention here that the taxis are bright tropical colors like tic-tacs – helps amongst the drab colors. We ate at the food court of the high end designer mall just down the road from us. We splurged and spent $4-$5 each for lunch. As for now we are done being trucked around some foreign dity city and are taking it easy and preparing ourselves for Pirates – updating the blog, making calls to try and find church for tomorrow, and watching the only English channel on TV, HBO.