Other than the temperature, the most striking change has been my living conditions, which I find amusing. I went from a guided tour, staying in nice hotels, to a youth hostel hanging out with Peace Corps volunteers. As Yake pointed out, this fits me better. Here half of the people are living out of a backpack, as opposed to me being the only person without wheeled luggage.
The first night here was pretty amusing, since I did basically nothing. Yake's luggage had been lost, so my Saturday consisted of landing at the airport, going to Bed Station, the hostel I'm staying at, seeing Chris and David, going back to the airport, and going back to Bed Station. At that point we went to get dinner, where we confused David by wanting Thai food. He had just come from central Thailand to meet up with us, and wanted anything but Thai food. He was a gracious host and showed us to a cool restaurant right by the hostel.
At that point we basically just bummed around and hung out until the wee hours of the morning, listening to music and playing Fifa. Hence my previous post being written hungover.
Sunday was a more active day, but we were all moving pretty slowly due to lack of sleep. I chose to blog instead of sleep, which caused me to fade throughout the day. Brunch was just 7-Eleven microwave meal while me and Dave waited for Yake to get up.
We then motivated ourselves to move by getting coffee. The BTS (transit system in Bangkok) is awesome. Smooth trains, fast, handles high volume well, cool inside. The elevated platforms help by catching some breeze while waiting for a train in 100 degree heat. I'm gonna hate the T when I get back. Blackbox Coffee was pretty good, and we got smoothies after coffee. Yake also got a meal there, which I got a taste out of. It was probably Pad Gaprao (romanization sucks just as bad in Thai...), which we've both really enjoyed every time we get it.
Yake was 100% ready for the photo I took of him.
After caffination, we went to Chatuchak Market, at the end of the BTS (Mo Chit station). It was a very different feel from the markets in Taiwan, which was cool. Much higher density of things to food, and much larger. We wandered around for an hour and a half, and barely scratched the surface. The picture is of one of the "roads" through the market. Most of the shops are within the structures along the road, in narrow alleys.
Once we got back from the market, I died, and slept from 7-7 again. Sleeping 12 hours at will is one of the best parts about being on vacation. It really shouldn't be that hard to do at home... Yake and Dave had a fun time at a bar with a really good sax player, or so I heard. Monday morning started off with some coffee at Di Cafe, which was about 100 feet from the hostel. They had a cool Singer footwheel that I played with incessantly while enjoying a morning affogato.
Monday we had a proper tourist day, now that we were slightly more acclimated to the heat. Started in the morning with the Jim Thompson house, a house created in mostly the classic Thai style by a Delaware architect. There were guided tours available in English, Thai, French, and Japanese, which seems like an odd language collection.
We then hopped a riverboat to get to the Golden Mound, which is a cool elevated temple. We stopped a couple of times to get some skyline views, and the inside was undergoing a paint job, so we didn't stay there too long. New paint smells just as bad here.
We then got some lunch, and hopped a Tuk Tuk to Wat Pho. I learned that Taxis are generally cheaper than Tuk Tuks in Bangkok, since Tuk Tuks are such a tourist-centric mode of transit. Well worth it for the death-defying experience.
Wat Pho was absolutely beautiful. We spent a bunch of time just wandering around. The Reclining Buddha was worth a drive-by (walk-by), but it was honestly just too big to get a view on. It was all of the small engravings and statues that added up to make Wat Pho so cool looking.
We also waited in a surprisingly long line just to see a monk praying in the central building. I'm guessing we would generally be allowed to wander in, but couldn't because of the ongoing prayer. Or something. I barely saw the monk in time to get a picture, so that's going to be the blurriest one I post, hopefully.
We then decided to walk to the Grand Palace, at which point a certain scam starts getting entertaining. Basically a guy in a Tuk Tuk will tell you that whatever you're going to is closed, but he knows something similar or cooler that you can enjoy instead. I don't actually know where it goes from there, having not fallen for it, but a Peace Corp volunteer mentioned on hearsay that you end up getting fit for a suit you don't want or something like that.
It's relevant here because parts of the Grand Palace actually are closed, due to the ongoing mourning period for the late Thai king. (Who's name I have a 0% chance of spelling. You can google it. He was an awesome king.) So me, Dave, and Yake ignored people telling us it was closed and just walked around the outside, which boasted an impressive wall, some mounties, a couple of cool views, and food overpriced to near American levels.
After that, we hopped a riverboat to Chinatown, which we were told was closed. We almost fell over laughing at that guy, wondering how the entirety of Chinatown could even be closed. Once we got there, it felt oddly comforting. Not like home, but just a familiar sight in a new city. Of course, we got there a bit too early for most of the food places to be open, so maybe that scammer had it right all along. As we decided to leave, places started opening up, and I got my first mango sticky rice in Thailand. Delicious.
I will admit to have entirely failed at the next part (in terms of photos), but it wasn't as cool, so it's OK. We ate dinner in Terminal 21, a pretty awesome mall. Each floor is themed as a specific international city, including Paris, Istanbul, Tokyo, London, San Francisco (there were actually 2 San Francisco floors). I spotted an anime and manga store. I debated buying Psychopass on DVD, since I've been meaning to watch it. However, the entire case was written in Thai, so I couldn't tell which audio tracks and subtitle options it had. Oh well. I did get some coffee in "London", though.
For dinner we met up with Molly, one of David's Peace Corps friends. We got some good food at near-extoritionate prices. (Or so Dave claims, I'm fine with paying $7 per person for food at dinner.) Meeting her was fun, and she had the same biting humor as Dave does, at least once she warmed up to us enough to drop the Midwestern niceties.
The last stop of the day was a bar pretty close to Bed Station, next to the Hungry Nerd. We worked through a couple of pitchers, and were generally enjoying the atmosphere and the terribleness that is Thai beer. The waitresses were also all pretty cute, which helped. Especially the one in the green Heineken dress. It was during this time that I realized that I can get dehydrated enough in Thailand to have a hangover while I'm drinking, which is really not a nice feeling. During our long day of touring, I had only drank about a half gallon of water, which is about half to a third of what I needed based on how hard I had been sweating all day.
So I begged off of our drinking expedition and drank a 1.5L bottle at Bed Station faster than I would have thought reasonable. I then crashed, and woke up an hour later in a puddle of my own sweat, which was pretty gross. I opened up a second bottle and sipped on that during a much more relaxing sleep for the rest of the night. On the plus side, I woke up feeling great, since I had already had my hangover the night before.
On Tuesday we went to David's site in Suphan Buri, which will be it's own post. I find it amusing that this post covers almost 3 days, but 95% of the post is devoted to Monday. That's been about right for the entire time here. It takes a large amount of motivation to do anything in the heat, so when things happen, they happen. Otherwise, we're laying down in the AC, enjoying a few beers and watching or listening to whatever.
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