Advertisement
Published: November 3rd 2009
Lots of Gold
Grand PalaceWe went from Ubud, Bali, Indonesia to Singapore. We flew on an airplane that was very fancy, and we had a very smooth flight. And purple cows like airplanes, so it was very fun.
We spent two days in Singapore.
Then we took another plane flight to Bangkok, Thailand. It was not quite so smooth and fun. It was kind of rainy when we landed, and when we went through the clouds it was very bumpy. So when we landed I felt a little bit sick. Purple cows do not like feeling sick.
Bangkok is the capital of Thailand. It’s a really big city. It’s kind of crazy and crowded. I was worried about getting overwhelmed, but I didn’t. I think I’m getting more used to being in Asia.
I didn’t know how much I liked Bangkok at first, but then I started liking it. It takes a bit of time to get used to a place, and know your way around it. And we were coming from Singapore, and it’s not nearly as fancy as Singapore.
Here are some thoughts about Bangkok:
What I liked best. It might have been eating
Crazy Sidwalk
This is what the stalls on the sidewalk look like. They're everywhere. breakfast, because that was really fun. We would go to a 7-11, which is a convenience store. It was two steps from our hotel, so we could get there really easy.
We would all pick out what we wanted for breakfast. Me and Ella would always pick a banana cake, which tasted like banana bread, and a coffee milk, which tasted like sweet milk with a slight coffee flavor. Dad got a Chinese bun with minced pork, or a toasted tuna sandwich, or sweet raisin roll and a big Coke. Mom got a yogurt and a fresh-squeezed orange juice from out on the street. Jordan got a yogurt or just an orange juice or a sweet bread of some sort.
Then we would go back to our hotel, and sit downstairs where there was a little restaurant - but we could sit there without getting anything. We would sit in these comfy chairs that had big cushions in them, and eat our delicious breakfast.
It was fun because the stuff was so yummy, and we could all get exactly what we wanted and be happy with it. It was more fun than going out to eat, because
it seemed more special than going out, and we’d been going out so much that we were sick of it, and it was good to eat a small meal in the morning.
What I liked least. There was a restaurant that we went to that served chicken and rice, but we weren’t quite sure where it was. So took a long walk looking for it, and the walk was crazy and very different.
There were stalls all out on the street that were selling things like fish heads and cut-up chickens and a lot of other unrecognizable things. There were also people everywhere, and it was hard to get through it, because there were stalls all along the sidewalks and a lot of people. And some of the stalls had things that were cooking, and they were hot, and you had to avoid them. And it was dark, and everything was kind of run-downish, and I hadn’t eaten any food, and purple cows are easily overwhelmed when they are low on food. There were also restaurants out on the street, and the restaurants were right on the sidewalk, and the people were eating strange things.
The most Strong Man
Grand Palace fun I had. Probably at the malls. There was an area with lots of malls, and I liked one of them in particular. It was extremely fancy. It had around seven floors of fancy stores, and it was air-conditioned, and there were lots of people but it wasn’t over-crowded. It was very clean, and there were fountains. It was fun to walk around. I generally just like malls, and this was a particularly good one.
The malls in Bangkok are similar to our malls, but a lot bigger, and a lot fancier, and there are advertisements written in Thai, and the people walking around are speaking Thai. They do have some of the same stores, but also some different ones. They have our fast food restaurants, but also lots and lots of other restaurants.
The most like home. Not much really reminded me of home too much. 7-11 was probably what reminded me most of home, because we have convenience stores at home too. They’re everywhere in Bangkok. It’s like a nice, really convenience store at a gas station, except it seems bigger than most of them, and it has a good selection of snacky things.
Money. Thai money is called baht. There are 35 baht in a dollar. So when I buy coffee milk at 7-11, it costs 12 baht, which around 30 or 35 cents or so. Phad thai (thai noodles with chicken) on the streets costs 40 baht, which is a little over a dollar.
Thai writing. Thai writing looks like lots of squarish squiggly lines. We can’t read it at all. But lots of things have English under them, so we can read the English. But if we see a sign with just Thai on it, we can’t make any sense of it at all. There’s a picture here of a sign with just Thai on it.
The cutest thing I saw. There are lots of dogs in Thailand, and they are all very spoiled - you can tell. They’re all princesses. A lot of them are Shih-Tzus (small, adorable, squashy-faced dogs). They’re all nicely-groomed, and a lot have pony-tails to keep their ears off the ground. People are usually carrying them around, and they're all very pampered.
There was one that was on top of a car while we walked by, on a side alleyway. And we stopped to
Me and Goldy Dragons
At the Grand Palace pet it, and it was very loving, and it kissed us, and we stayed there for a while and loved it. It was so cute.
The best food I ate. Chicken and rice, probably. It was just like the chicken and rice other places, which we’ve described - very good.
To get there, we walked along a street with stalls along the road selling mostly food. Most of the things I couldn’t really recognize.
The restaurant had about 10 tables with stools around them. It was open to the street. It was more like a stall than a restaurant. All it served was chicken rice, duck rice, and pork rice. The kitchen was up at the front. The kitchen had a place to hang the chickens, a counter to cut things, and a big pot full of chicken broth.
We sat at one of the tables and ordered. You could watch the workers making the chicken rice right there. They would cut up the chicken, put it on a plate with a scoop of rice, and cut up a cucumber and put it on the plate too.
Then they would bring it to us. There
would be a bunch of sauces on the table. You could put all the spices you wanted on them - only most of the sauces were spicy, and purple cows don’t like spicy things, so I just used one. The one I used was black and salty. It was sort of like soy sauce, but was thicker and a fishy-ish taste. To drink there was a pot of tea that tasted like water, and you drank it out of a tin cup with lots of ice, and you drank it out of a little stubbyish straw.
The weirdest food I ate. Phad thai, which is thai noodles with egg, bean sprouts, chicken, chopped vegetables, and peanuts. We ate it from a stall on the street. Instead of sitting on a table, we sat on a stoop near the phad thai stall.
The actual food wasn’t very weird, but we ate it literally on the street. People were walking by you, and there were stalls everywhere selling food like corn and fruit, and other phad thai stalls. There were ladies walking down the street selling these wooden frog-croaker-instrument-things. It was seriously hot. It was hard to see because we
Pretty Tiles
Grand Palace were sweating so much. There weren’t many cars on the street; it was mostly motorcycles and people.
The most interesting thing I did. The Grand Palace, which is the palace that the king and queen used to live in. It’s very big and golden.
To get to the Grand Palace, we had to cross a series of about five roads. They were kind of hard to cross because there were cars coming from like 20 different directions.
If you stood in the Grand Palace and turned around in a circle, you would see lots of oddly shaped pointy buildings, most of which were gold, and lots of bird-people statues and giant statues and strong-people statues and guard statues. There were lots of tourists - lots of white tourists, lots of Chinese tour groups, lots of Japanese tourists.
There were lots of tall golden structures everywhere that usually ended in a point. And there were colorful statues around them. There was a kilometer-long mural that told a never-ending story, about the Ramayana (which is a famous story originally from India).
We spent a morning there. It was really hot. We took a lot of pictures, and
Monster Gobbling People
Grand Palace - Ramayana Murals they do a pretty good job of explaining what it’s like.
Where we slept. We slept in a hotel. We got two different rooms, for two people each. I slept in one room with Ella and Jordan, and Mom and Dad slept in the other room. They were right next to each other.
The rooms were air-conditioned, which was very good because it was very hot. We each had our own bathroom here, which was a bit unusual, because in Malaysia and Singapore we never had our own bathroom - we shared a bathroom with a few other rooms.
Where we ate. We ate chicken rice once a day, once we discovered it. Before that we ate phad thai once a day. The other meal we either ate at a Middle Eastern restaurant (felafal and hummus) or a fast food restaurants (Subway, McDonald’s, or Burger King). Bangkok was not a delicious food place, but we were fine. We ate breakfast every morning at 7-11
We also ate fruit, at least once a day. You ate the fruit out of plastic bags. There were stalls on the street. You would order, and the person would cut up
Ta-Dahh!
Grand Palace whatever fruit you chose and put it into a plastic bag, and they would put a long wooden toothpick in to eat it with. We would get watermelon or pineapple. They also had papaya and mango too.
How we got around. We got around by river taxi, sky-train, taxi, and walking. The river taxi was a boat that had seats along the edges and places for people to stand in the middle. One ride we did was very bumpy, and it got very seasick. The river taxi runs pretty much everywhere you would want to go - there’s a river that runs down the center of Bangkok.
The sky-train was a train on a track that has posts running up into the air a good bit. It’s like riding on a really long bridge, or up in the air like a monorail track. It’s a train track up in the air, about as high as a two-storey building.
The roads in Bangkok are a complete mess. They are trafficky, and many lanes wide. There are lots of stoplights, lots of cars trying to get into another lane, lots of different directions coming into the same stoplight (so
your stoplight spends a lot more time being red than green). Lots and lots and lots of cars. A taxi ride can take 45 minutes to get somewhere that should take about 10 minutes. The taxis are nice, though, so it’s OK.
Wat Po - Reclining Buddha. A “wat” is a Thai Buddhist temple. This particular wat had a giant Buddha in it. It was about as long as two tennis courts - it was really, really big. It was gold. It was laying down, except for it was propped up on its elbow. Most Buddhas in temples are sitting up or standing.
The temple it was in had some colorful tower things that looked like they were made out of tiles. They looked like giant cakes with colorful icing on them.
Bangkok was not great, but it was OK. It was big and chaotic and hot. It wasn’t particularly nice. It wasn’t bad, but it was sort of run-down and dirty and polluted. But I liked the Grand Palace a lot, and I liked the malls, and I liked our room, and I liked the 7-11s.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.154s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0698s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Louisa Goebel
non-member comment
Great descriptions
Patsy describes Bangkok so well; we can picture the streets, food stalls, Grand Palace, and even the sweat as you walk around! Thanks for the great descriptions! Keep them coming! Love, Louisa and Paul