The Marble Temple and tuk-tuk ride

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Once leaving the Grand Palace we started to walk to the Reclining Buddha (Wat Pho) and were stopped by what seemed a helpful person……we should know better. The guy told us the Wat Pho was closed for the night and that we should take a look at other options. He arranged us to take a tuk-tuk (motorized carriage) to two more temples and then to the shopping center. I need to get some tank tops….as it is hot as Hades here. The tuk-tuk driver misses the first temples we think we are going to and heads straight for the Marble Temple (Wat Benchamabophit). It is a smaller temple complex but is interesting because it has many Buddha statues showing the different poses of the Buddha (see pictures).
At the temple a “nice foreigner”, he said he lived in Washington DC but was from Thailand, told us about how he had bought gems from the specialty wholesale place and then was able to sell them for double the price in the US. We have heard of this scam before so we just went with it and let him talk as we were waiting for our tuk-tuk driver, who conveniently left to use the bathroom during this discussion. We were then driven to the “gem wholesale outlet” to take a look; we disappointed them greatly by not buying anything. We then told our driver to take us to our hotel and he took us to the silk store for us to get clothes made. Once again we disappointed by not buying. We tried to convince our driver that we wanted to go to the hotel but he seemed to not know where it was…he ended up dropping us off at a market close to our hotel, from where we were able to walk to the hotel.

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