Thailand - Day Two (part one) - Bangkok

It's insane how much we fit into this day.


The Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (or Wat Phra Kaew) was our first stop. The Palace is enormous, tons of gold leaf and reflective jewels. Women have to wear skirts past their knees and if they wear sandals, there must be straps in the back. Men also must where pants past their knees. So I had to put a 100 Baht deposit down on some pants. It was 98 degrees and sunny.


After the Grand Palace we headed over to the Wat Pho (Temple of the Reclining Buddha). As we walked, guys kept telling us it was closed until 1 p.m. Seemed reasonable to me, Lisa felt otherwise. As we approached the temple, there were tons of tourist buses and the place was clearly open. The guys were taxi drivers, trying to get us to join them for a "special tour" or "one day only" sale. Bottom line, Lisa's brilliant, I'm not. The highlight of the area was the reclining Buddha. Just massive.

People are praying at many of the temples and all I can think is this is a movie set. I haven't laid eyes on anything like this in all my life. This was also where we received our first Thai massage, and supposedly this location is where it all began. We got 30 minutes for $7 each. Thai massage is pretty much attacking pressure points. Yes, a little pain is involved. We were lying next to each other.

After the Wat Poh we got caught in a down pour next to this government building where two guards let us wait out the rain. We made our way to another temple known as the Wat Ratchabophit. Alone and silent. This is very rare in Bangkok, a city of 12 million. It is like a spread out Chicago. Tall buildings and people everywhere. I never felt like I was in the quiet part of the city (except for maybe this moment).

Then we walked. Attempting to find restaurants in Bangkok is difficult. We had addresses and names of places that Lisa had gotten recommendations to from either friends or the internet, but people don't read maps in English and even names seem to be pronounced differently. We found ourselves in an alley with four different families coming out to try and point us in the right direction. It took about 20 minutes for someone to realize we were 1.5 blocks away.
The restaurant was called Chote Chitr. It was small (7 tables) and had newspaper clippings of reviews from all over the world (including the NYT) covering the walls. This is the size of a prawn (shrimp). The highlight was the banana leaf salad, which was nothing like salad.

The entire meal was less than $15 and amazing. In general, we always drank bottled water, and stayed away from ice and salad.

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