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Published: August 3rd 2011
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Snake Show
Don't try this at home, kids. Our journey back to Bangkok started early and involved many stops. The guides thought that if we made it a long day with plenty of mini-breaks it wouldn’t seem so long and maybe, perhaps, we would miss some of the horrendous Bangkok rush hour traffic. (That plan didn’t seem to work – or traffic at rush hour is even worse than I imagined; at 7PM it still took over 40 minutes to drive two kilometers.)
Our first stop was at a large gemstone manufacturer. Of course photos were not allowed inside. Many thousands (or more?) of gemstones and jewelry pieces were on display. There were also many gem-encrusted statues (including a beautiful peacock) and “paintings” made with miniscule gem chips (I liked the one of the Taj Mahal – multiple thousands of dollars). Matthew and I quickly walked through the jewelry section, knowing that we wouldn’t afford most pieces, but plenty of the women on the trip ended up with jewelry in some form.
There were several other stops that all merge together in my mind. We stopped at a leather manufacturer (expensive but beautiful – we admired from afar), a butterfly garden (we couldn’t find any butterflies), and
World's Largest Restaurant
I don't think people come here for the food. a place that had a snake show (guys putting cobras into their mouths and other odd feats) and sold “medicine” made out of different parts of snake. Basically, it seemed like a day designed to get tourists to spend money. I spent time sleeping on the bus.
In the evening we had dinner at a place that is (was?) in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest restaurant in the world: 5000 seats, 12,000 staff, nearly nine acres. Huge! It was a Chinese restaurant (real Chinese food, not American Chinese), but like the other days on our trip we were served mediocre Vietnamese and Thai-ish food. Thu kept hoping that one day we’d have Pad Thai, but that never happened. I reminded her that the Vietnamese people we know like eating Vietnamese food and it’s rather hard to get them to try something new, so it seemed that the meals on this trip were designed to accommodate that mindset. I was not feeling well or up to eating much, but even so I was a bit tired of seeing the same food twice a day, every day. If it was Vietnamese food like what we make at home, that would be different – we often eat that for days on end. But this…no.
We arrived in Bangkok around 8PM and checked into our hotel and then decided to go out and see a bit of the town. Using a map from the hotel, we figured out where we thought the night market would be and hopped a subway to get there. The subway is clean, beautiful – and it’s ten years old. When we got off the subway and walked to where the night market was on the map, nothing was there. A tuk-tuk driver told us that it moved down a bit, so we had a stretch of the legs and found it in full swing.
The night market was expensive. Goods in Thailand are already more expensive than in Vietnam, and the night market venders didn’t really want to bargain – and it’s against my policy to buy things from people who won’t bargain unless the price is clearly marked (at least in countries where bargaining is common). (Side note: Our guide said that the average government salary is about 8,000 baht a month, roughly $250. That’s about what we estimate the average Vietnamese salary is, but things are more expensive in Thailand. I think it would be very difficult to live on such a salary. Thank goodness busses are free.) We did end up with a couple tiny things (costume jewelry), and then decided to sit and get something to eat. Pizza Hut! We were curious about the pizza, since in Vietnam we hear it’s difficult to find anything that actually tastes like pizza. That is not the case in Thailand! It was so good and the crust was just like at home. The restaurant itself was very nice, clean and elegantly furnished – the nicest restaurant on the trip.
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