Arrival, Acclimatization, and Temples Galore

NYC to Taipei
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16 January 2006

    From the largest city in the States to the largest city in Southeast Asia!  After only 24 hours in Bangkok, we've landed and already expanded our horizons.  The 30 hours of airports and planes were uneventful and seemingly interminable.  We'd been in Bangkok for 3 hours before we finally set foot outside the airport (thank you immigration), only to get onto yet another form of transportation, the CORRECT bus (no small matter).  From there, however, things got much easier, and we began to appreciate our new home on the road.

Big, Beautiful, Ballistic, Bangkok

20 of our 30 hours
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    Bangkok is big, beautiful, busy, and ballistic, but a balm to our bewildered psyches.  Finding our hotel proved far easier than we could have hoped, and we are still coming to terms with the genuine friendliness of the Thai people we meet.  Coming from the US and having recently been in a Mexican border town, it is difficult not to be skeptical of truly nice strangers, but after our first day here we are learning.

    A chance meeting with an outgoing and helpful Thai grass lounger on a traffic island in a sea of taxis, tuk tuks, and buses led us on our first adventure.  He gave us a brief (15 min.) spoken tour of our illegible, free map and then hailed us the best tuk tuk driver in all of Bangkok (as far as we have seen).  Our driver, Joo, then took us on an open-air tour of some of the major temples in the area, including a relaxing lunch on the river, fitting at the best tailor in Bangkok (a recommendation from another friendly, if extremely loquacious Thai we met in the temple of the Lucky Buddha), and a stop at the tourist info center to buy our Cambodian visas and bus tickets.

Laos From Above
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    A great start!

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19 January 2006

Bangkok, thusfar, has been a wonderful conglomerations of contradictions.  How can such a busy, fast, bargaining place be Buddhist?  We are still wondering.  The last few days have been spent sightseeing and warding off overzealous tuk tuk drivers.  We took a longtail boat tour of the river and some of the channels and were able to glimpse life on the water.  After being discouraged by the prices quoted at travel agencies, we got thai boxing tickets on our own (1000 baht cheaper) and definitely got our money's worth.  The ticket paid for 10 matches each with 5 rounds making for about 4 and a half hours worth of boxing.  Happily, there was little blood and no broken bones (at least visibly).

Laos From Above
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Our trip to the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha yesterday is beyond description.  It's nearly impossible to believe that so much opulence and grandeur can exist in one place (granted neither of us has ever been to the Taj Mahal).  Hopefully the pictures can give you some idea of the place.  Also you can see more at: http://www.palaces.thai.net

In that same vein, the Reclining Buddha (just across the street from the Grand Palace complex) is, for lack of a better word, big.  And gold.  He's a big, gold, reclining Buddha.  What more can we say. 

Our First Glimpse Of Thailand
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On a different note, we realize now what a mistake we made in packing.  Really, we should have just brought the clothes we wore on the plane and a plastic bag with our toiletries in it.  Everything here is just so cheap it's unbelievable.  Today we bought only what we wanted to travel with: two shirts, two pairs of pants, a pair of silk boxers, and a purse, all handmade, along with a calculator for about fifteen US dollars.  It is a constant effort to try to keep our American consumerist instincts from running wild.

Beginning Our Descent
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Well fed, overstimulated, and ready to move on, we head to Cambodia tomorrow morning by bus.