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Published: November 6th 2008
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Non Boy Team
It's a little blurry, but the bus is called the Non Boy Team... Wouldn't this be the Girl team? So, we flew the budget airline, Air Asia from Bali to Jakarta to Bangkok. The plane from Bali to Jakarta had literally 6 inches of leg room between seats. We basically had to climb on the seats before wedging ourselves into our seats. Luckily it was only an hour and a half flight. The flight from Jakarta to Bangkok was slightly more spacious as we got emergency exit row seats, which made for a slightly more pleasant and comfortable flight. We were dropped off by the taxi in Banglamphu, a neighborhood next to the river where there are is a lot of cheap accomodation and many, many backpackers. Our first night we stayed in a cheap hotel that smelled quite strongly of urine. Strongly enough that we ventured out that night just for incense. It helped, but not much. The next morning we found a nice guest house on a quiet soi (lane) near the river.
Our first full day in Bangkok was spent doing some errands. We went to the American embassy so that I could have more pages put in my passport. It went quite smoothly and it only took 10 minutes to get my passport back even
though they told me that it would take an hour (not sure why as they only have to tape new pages in). From the embassy we went to MBK. MBK has to be seen to be believed. It is a monstrosity of a shopping center. Across the street is Siam Center which is upscale, super expensive shopping. MBK is seriously the biggest shopping center you can imagine. It's eight stories tall and about 234235 miles long. Okay, not really but probably at least 1/2 mile. Maybe. I have no idea. It's huge. Stephanie and I more or less had to hold hands so that we didn't lose each other. And it took us ages to find out way out. Anyway, we went to MBK to buy cellphones. We bought one in Australia but I lost in Bali and the replacement we bought for it was absolutely useless. Seriously useless. MBK has an entire floor dedicated to mobile phones. This might not seem that daunting, but this means that there is an entire floor filled with different stalls selling millions of phones each. I thought phones would be relatively cheap in Bangkok, and some of them are. An iPhone is almost
$600 though. I finally picked out a phone that I wanted and set about negotiating the price, going from stall to stall until I found one that gave me the best price on the color I wanted. All told, it probably took about 2.5 hours before I had the phone in my hot little hand.
To sum up the first day, we sat in traffic for what felt like years (we managed to time all of our taxi trips for what seemed like rush hour, which is actually 24 hours a day, I think). We visited the embassy right after Obama was elected and everyone was in a good mood. We got lost in a shopping center that has everything from karaoke to bowling to IKEA type furniture shops to "sales" of clothing tossed in piles on the floor. Oh! And we ran into a girl, Betsy, that we had rowed with in high school and hadn't seen in 7 or 8 years. Weird.
Last night we went out on Th Khao San. Talk about crazy. It's weird and wonderful, and nothing like the rest of Bangkok. People watching is at its prime. Seriously. Anyway, we grabbed a
plastic stool in the street at one of the million "bars" (a tent serving alcohol) and made new friends while drinking buckets. Yes, alcohol here is served in buckets. Like sand castle buckets. Neon lights, weird fashion, drunk people, bugs to eat, falafel, Khao San has it all.
Today, our second full day in Thailand, we woke up late and decided to do something cultural, so we took a river taxi to Wat Pho, the home of the reclining buddha. The buddha is something like 46 meters long and 18 meters tall. I don't have the book so I won't be too accurate here, but the buddha is in a reclining pose passing into the final stage of nirvana. I took a lot of pictures and none of them truly captured the colors of the roofs and stupas and buddhas, so use your imagination. The buddha is covered in gold leaf and is gorgeous. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.
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