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Published: December 1st 2018
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Grand Palace
The Grand Palace is the most important royal palace in Thailand. “One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster"
If we are going to write a blog entry about Bangkok we just have to somewhere quote “One Night in Bangkok”. We might as well do it in the beginning to get it over with.
Our vacation trip in Southeast Asia took us to four countries. We have so far written about three of these, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia. In this and the next two blog entries we are going to write about the last of the four - Thailand. Here we will focus on Bangkok.
Grand Palace Grand Palace is the most important royal palace in Thailand. The royal family doesn’t live there so on most days it is open for visitors. The royal family has a status which royalties elsewhere don’t have. That in combination with the fact that Grand Palace is well worth visiting ensures that the place is ridiculously crowded every day. Add to it that the palace grounds is cluttered with statues, stupas, palace buildings, temples and much more that we don’t even know what to call it and you have a rather chaotic place. But since chaos is
Grand Palace
The royal family doesn’t live there so on most days it is open for visitors. the normal situation in Bangkok the Grand Palace feels like a logical extension of the rest of the city.
It was interesting to make a visit there mostly because it is so different from other palaces we have been to. In palaces elsewhere we are used to see large open spaces and one or just a few massive palace buildings. Here there were many smaller buildings and hardly any space at all between them. We have added several pictures from Grand Palace and in a few of them you might be able to get a feeling of what we are talking about here.
Siriraj Medical Museum There are many very interesting and unusual things on display in this museum. If you are interested in seeing things you might never get to see in any other museum, especially if you are interested in the weird and/or bizarre, this is the place for you. A few of the thousands of things they have on display are
• the preserved body of a convicted murderer
• foetuses of conjoined twins
• several human skeletons from men who donated their bodies to science
Sculptures
A building with hundreds of small sculptures attached to the facade • a human testicle so large that the owner needed a wheel barrow to carry it in
• photos of people who have died in gruesome accidents
Some of the things you can see in this museum are quite disturbing to be honest. If you are sensitive, don’t visit it! Several times we decided to leave a section without watching all of it because the first three of four photos were quite enough.
We weren’t allowed to take photos in Siriraj Medical Museum. But Ake decided to take one picture anyway. He just had to take a photo of a jar containing a pair of conjoined twins. Conjoined twins are also known as Siamese twins. Siam was an earlier name of Thailand. So we can say we have seen Siamese twins in Siam. We will return to the topic conjoined twins in our next blog entry by the way. Because one day we visited the town where Chang and Eng Bunker, a famous pair of conjoined twins, were born.
Canal boats This is not your typical tourist destination and was never designed to be one either. Many years ago Bangkok was crisscrossed with
Grand Palace
Grand Palace is well worth visiting and it is ridiculously crowded every day. canals and they were an important part of the urban transport system. Eventually busses, trains and metro became more important and the canals were used less and some of them were abandoned and later filled in. However some of the canals are still there and using the canal boats for transport is cheap and is often faster than going with a bus. We also found the boats interesting for sightseeing. By going with the boats instead of with the metro we got to see parts of Bangkok we would never have seen otherwise. We liked that and can recommend anyone to try it out.
Hope you enjoyed reading about what we were up to in Bangkok. By the way, what you read in this blog entry isn’t everything we saw in Bangkok. The last of the three Thailand blogs will be a theme blog about temples in Thailand. We have put pictures from the temples we saw in Bangkok in there. So we still have a few more stories we'd like to share with you. Hope you make your way to them as well. This is all for now.
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Dancing Dave
David Hooper
Follow that Road
When the abundance of water is its lifeblood 'tis nice to see river travel going by. In "a Night in Bangkok" 'tis amazing how much one can fit in.