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Grand Palace 1
Upon entry you are greeted by a toothless statueDay 20 and 21 Sunday and Monday, February 1st - 2nd, 2009
The hostel we stayed at in Bangkok was very clean, very new, and very quiet because I’m pretty sure we were the only guests. I had only two complaints: 1) The beds were so hard that a plywood box covered in a bed sheet may have been more comfortable and 2) The location was not that great.
I was so completely disinterested with being there that I didn’t take notes and my time there was so atrocious that I’ve blocked most of it from memory so this entry will just be an overview.
We decided we should do at least one touristy thing while in Bangkok and we thought the Grand Palace might be interesting. We hailed a cab and I pointed at the Grand Palace on a map. The driver, who spoke no English, nodded and we were on our way. I thought we were anyway. Then we arrived…at a different palace. WTF? We protested and again I pointed to the map. He then proceeded to have an argument with a guard at ‘wrong’ palace, both of them told us ‘no’ as if we weren’t
allowed to go to the Grand Palace and that we should visit ‘wrong’ palace instead. But we held firm and finally the driver sighed and drove us to the correct palace. I will add here that his meter was running the entire time.
It was around 100 degrees without a cloud in the sky and few trees for shade. The Grand Palace was, uh, historical, I guess. The buildings were tightly packed to the point of feeling claustrophobic. That feeling was made worse by the fact that most buildings were covered in a array of mirror and porcelain mosaics. Liberace would have loved it.
After we finished our tourist duty we hid at various malls for the majority of our time there. We saw two movies and shopped for books. Taking cabs in Bangkok was a giant pain. Most drivers didn’t want to turn on their meter. They instead wanted to give us a flat rate which was usually three or four times what the job should cost. On one occasion we had to get in and out of three cabs before we found one that wouldn’t rip us off. People in Bangkok are not friendly and most
do not speak English. Now, I don’t expect the whole world to speak English for my convenience, but we had just come from a place where small children gave us sales pitches in eight different languages, so it was a surprise.
By Tuesday we couldn’t have been more ready to return to China. My dorm room might not be much, but after three weeks of traveling it felt like home.
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Trish
non-member comment
Yeah
Someone went crazy with the bedazzler