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Published: March 27th 2007
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Sarah at Grand Palace
Any gold you see in the pictures at the Grand Palace is real gold. BANGKOK 27/03/07 - 30/03/07
Arriving back in Bangkok, we were again reminded of the smell. Since we had 3 days here, we decided to see the sights.
In traditional Bangkok style, it was excruciatingly hot and unbelievably humid. With both of us having grown up in Townsville, we thought we would be quite accustomed to profuse sweating and the fierce sun, but we were wrong. Bravely, we ventured off to the Grand Palace which is nowadays used only for occasional ceremonial purposes and is no longer the royal residence. The Palace is an incredible compound of glittering buildings, golden spires, mythical guardian figures and the revered Emerald Buddha (which we could not take a photo of unfortunately). After about 40 minutes, it was time to find somewhere airconditioned to cool off.
Later that day there was more shopping at another large shopping centre, a boat ride along the river, and more shopping around Siam Square. That night, it was off to the Night Bazaar Markets. These were amazing. Great and cheap shopping, wide isles to browse, very little hassling, excellent and wide choice of food, fabulous fruit shakes, and awesome live entertainment area. All throughout the night,
there were Asian teens up on stage imitating and singing the current songs from the pop charts. Some were actually quite good. To top it off, there was a ferris wheel, yay! Unfortunately for those planning on going to Thailand, these markets will only be operating until June when they will be demolished for high-density housing. A definite shame!!
The next day was jammed packed full of relaxation. First it was off to Wat Po for a traditional Thai Massage. This school was originally set up by a monk who wanted to help the blind by employing them as massage therapists. Nowadays, the therapists are regular young Thai men and women. It took about 90 minutes and cost the grand price of about $15 AUD. Sarah opted for a foot reflexology instead, which definitely worthwhile. Julie however opted for the fully-fledged massage with herbs. Now, expecting a nice relaxing massage, she was quite surprised to find out that Thai massage is more of a workout than relaxing. The therapist moved her body into positions that she didn’t think were possible. However after it was all over, she felt quite relaxed and limber.
After that, it was off to
MBK (the huge shopping centre) to pamper ourselves further with some pedicures and other beauty treatments. Oh my word, the pedicure and foot scrub was by far the BEST EVER!!! These women worked miracles on our hard, disgusting feet. Value for money too, that’s for sure. We sat there being pampered for about an hour. By the end, we felt like a million dollars. We had had such a relaxing and delightful day so far, but things were about to change when Julie decided to get an eyebrow and eyelash tint. After being assured by the beautician that she could match the right colouring to my fair skin, Julie took the chance…..and it DID NOT pay off. Julie likes to refer that experience as the Bangkok Beauty Disaster!! They eyelashes turned out fabulously, however the eyebrows were a nightmare. It is quite surprising how your eyebrows can make the difference, and make you look like a freakish clown if done wrong. Check out the photos. After expressing her discontent quite profusely with the beautician and trying numerous ways to fix the problem, Julie had been condemned to the craziest eyebrows for at least 3 weeks, or until they grew out.
Luckily in these situations, one can only laugh, and we definitely had some chuckles over this one. Especially since the same thing had happened to Sarah shortly before we left Australia.
So after all of this, we were finally all shopped out and ready to get to London where things were normal. Unfortunately on the last night, there was not much of a party since we were both still a little of colour from the funky but delicious food.
The flight to London left at 12:30pm, so we decided to turn up nice and early to do some duty free shopping and exchange some cash. However, in true style, this didn’t exactly go to plan. It seemed as though STA Travel did not inform us of the flight changes. Apparently the flight time had been moved forward by 1.5 hours. By the time we checked in, we were told the flight left in 35 minutes. So after a sprint through security, customs and to the boarding gate, we luckily made it on time. Someone was looking out for us that day. It is just lucky that we decided to be there early, otherwise I’d hate to think what
could have happened. To make things worse, we were boarded on to a plane which didn’t have our own private TV screens to watch movies. No happy Jan!!
Arriving in London it took about 1.5 hours to get through passport control. We finally met up with Wendy who took us to our new home.
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