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Published: March 5th 2008
This blog will be a bit all over the place as it will sum up the rest of our time in Bangkok.
For being two people who don't really like big cities, we spent way more time in this one than we had intended, mainly due to being sick the first few days, then trying to find a dressmaker and having to time things around the dressmaker's schedule, oh yeah, and me taking a Thai Massage Course (after much encouragement by Trevor of course!).
One thing to absolutely take advantage of in Thailand, especially in Bangkok due to the many options, is beauty/salon services. I got a haircut for 100 Baht (that's like $3), lots of waxing for 350 baht, and we both got hour long massages for 180 baht. All this at home would have cost us a ton, so it was pretty amazing. There are salons all over the place offering special deals on these services, plus facials, peels, etc. After our massages, we noticed that the place also offered one-on-one thai massage courses...30 hours of instruction (over 5 days) for 5000 baht! At home a course of this nature would cost several times that at least.
Thai Massage Class
Cara learning a complex move and trying it out on Lada, her teacherSo I signed up! Trevor happily agreed to figure out what to do during the time I would be in class (knowing that I would need someone to practice on of course).
I started massage school the next day at the Salon's main location which was a couple blocks away with a great teacher (who spoke very good english) named Lada. Mostly class entailed her working on me to show me the moves (as I followed along with the illustrated instructions) and then I tried them out on her as she gave me tips. There are over 100 moves in a traditional Thai Massage so when I finally got to the point of being able to do all of them in order, it took about 3 hours! It's quite a workout to give Thai massage and I spent several days hardly able to walk if I sat for too long due to screaming leg and glute muscles. Trevor got to come in on my last day of class to be a practice subject...he survived, although I have to admit, it was very different working on him than working on a tiny Thai lady half his size (a lot more
work for me!).
We did actually get some sightseeing worked in around my classes. We toured the Palace and Wat Phra Kaew (next to the palace) one morning. On the way there we were almost foiled by one of the people the guidebooks warn you about who tell you that the palace is closed for the next couple of hours and so in the meantime you should take a tuk-tuk over to some place where something really cool is going on (which really just ends up being a shop where they get commission for sending you). He seemed so friendly at first and genuinely interested in helping us see the good sights of the city, but then he mentioned the tuk-tuk and there just so happened to be one nearby that he summoned and we quickly thanked him and walked away. Another morning we visited Wat Arun (Temple of Dawn) and Wat Saket, which had an extremely huge gold reclining Buddha. The wats are really interesting to visit, but ultimately they all have a variety of Buddha statues in different positions, Stupas (or Chedis) which seem to be a place where remains of important figures are housed, but also
serve as neat things to see as you only see the outside of them typically and they come in all sizes, and of course worship halls where there is usually the main Buddha statue where people come and pray and make offerings. There are more to the Wats of course but basically they all have the same things.
We did more walking around checking out the various market stalls all over the city, as well as actual permanent markets like the night market where they had live music, a beer garden and permanent vendors. One evening we shared a little table at a street food vendor stall in our neighborhood with a fellow American tourist who ended up talking our ears off for about 3 hours...we were finally rescued by a british guy who saw our suffering and jumped in, giving us an opening and opportunity to make our exit. He was actually a very nice guy who was extremely knowledgeable about a wide variety of interesting things and we started out really enjoying the conversation, but then it just ended up being him talking and he turned out to be a bit weird and we were struggling to
stay awake. Ahh the joys of living in backpackerville.
After getting some important errands taken care of on Saturday (March 1) we finally were ready to leave the city! We headed to the train station and amazingly found a train leaving in 10 minutes to Ayutthaya, our next destination. Or original plan had been to head to Cambodia but we realized at the last minute that our online visa's would take 3 days to process and we certainly didn't want to spend any more time in Bangkok, so we decided on a town that wouldn't be too far out of the way of our path to the border to spend a few days.
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George
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The Palace Closure Scam
Glad to hear that you didn' fall for that scam. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw you were in Bangkok. I have a friend who fell for it pretty bad. He didn't realize it was a scam even when he was back in the States. He told everybody that it was closed for renovations while he was there. Somebody finally had the heart to tell him it was a scam.