Destination: Thailand!!!

So,
As you know, Amanda and I recently traveled to Thailand. We were there for two weeks to explore and relax. It seems like you could spend months exploring and still not see everything, but we also needed a little time to just chill out on the beach. I have attempted to fill in the account of our trip in a chronological journal - enjoy.

Bangkok: First Full Day

We rolled out of bed at around 5:30AM wide awake and decided to kill a bit of time reading and then head out to see some of the major tourist attractions in Bangkok.

When we got to the Grand Palace, we found that it didn't open until 8:30.

There was plenty to do in the area, so we decided to spend some time in the nearby market. Every morning people give food to the monks who are all over the city. You will see one picture below in which a vendor setup specific ready-made plates to be given to the monks. As we walked around, a vendor offered us a taste of a fruit that we later found to be a mangostine. Very tasty.

From Thailand

We went to the Spirit Center of the city and watched as people made their donations of oil, food, flowers, and clothing for the Buddha statues housed there.

From Thailand

By now it was 8:30 and the Grand Palace was finally open. We went in and were blown away (as you can see from the pictures). An entire city block is taken up with amazingly decorated buildings palaces and wats (Buddhist temples). Here is a sample, click on it to see the rest of the amazing pictures that we took:

From Thailand

After the Grand Palace we headed over to Wat Pho, home of the Reclining Buddha. This was absolutely enormous filling the entire building. The best I could do for giving you some perspective was to compare my hand with it's toe:


To round out the day, we took a ferry across the river to Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn.


What a long day! We were asleep again by 8:30PM, but it was much easier to stay up than our first night.

Let the hurdles begin

We got to the airport early so that we could ensure that we would get seats together (for some reason we were able to reserve Amanda's seat but not mine). After several exclamations of never having seen anything like this before, and several phone calls, we both had seats - unfortunately not together. Once on the plane, we began trading with the people around us to get our seats together. For a 15-hour over night flight we figured it was pretty important. Once we had successfully traded, along came other people who claimed to have the exact same seat as both of our original seats (though now there were other random people sitting there). After much fuss and shuffling and a stroke of luck, we somehow ended up in the exit row - next to each other.
I took a sleeping pill, Amanda didn't... they work. I woke up a good 10 hours into our flight. The rest of it went by without much of a hitch though I did feel groggy from the pill.

We transferred in the Taipei and again in Hong Kong. Taipei not so nice, Hong Kong beautiful - the airports I mean.

From Thailand

We arrived in Bangkok at last at around 2PM (+2 days). Let me tell you that we weren't really prepared to be sleep-deprived, semi-drugged, hungry, and disoriented in a country where we didn't speak a work of their language. Thanks to some excellent directions from my brother Aaron we made it to our hotel.

We grabbed a map at the hotel lobby and did our best to stay awake until night time. We needed food and to get our bearings so we set out on our first adventure. After about 20 minutes of complete and utter disorientation, fatigue, hunger and sheer panic at crossing the road and seeing the cars screaming towards us from the wrong side of the road we made an important discovery. The brilliant map-makers decided to include a blow-up to show more detail of the area we were in. However, in the blow-up part, North was towards the right of the map, while in the non-blow-up part North was at the top. *Bing* a light went off in my head and it suddenly all made sense. The "lost/disoriented" feeling was gone.

From Thailand

We found a restaurant the was recommended by our guide book. They had amazing curry - like nothing I have had in the States. We bumbled around until dark, and started making our way back to the hotel, nearly getting hit by cars as we continually checked the wrong direction (they drive on the left). I think we made it until 8PM.