I love Bangkok!

The Grand Palace, Bangkok.
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I arrived in Bangkok yesterday morning, and fell in love with it immediately! It's a fantastic city, and rivals Delhi for my favourite city.

Soon after getting here I took the bus to the weekend market, Chatuchak, which is on the outskirts of Bangkok.  The bus ride took about an hour, cost 7 baht (about 5 cents) and gave me a chance to see a lot of Bangkok.  The market itself is amazing.  There are thousands of stalls, selling everything from silk scarves to tiny little dogs to fried roaches and worms (I didn't try one, but I was tempted). I walked around the market for about 4 hours, after which I decided it was too hot and I needed to spend some time with some air conditioning.

Me in front of the Grand Palace.
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For dinner, I walked around the streets of Banglamphu, the area where I am staying.  There are a ton of backpackers here, as well as food stalls lining every inch of the road.  I had dinner with a clothing designer from Australia who comes here twice a year to get inspirtion for her designs.  I had green curry chicken for about $1!

Today I visited the palace.  Thailand is a kingdom, and its strange to see signs reading "Long Live the King" on every corner.  They wouldn't let me into the palace because my pants were too short (they are three quarter length), so I had to rent a skirt to wear over my pants.  I was lucky though, because I saw a bunch of guards approach a man and haul him out of the palace because his pants had a rip in it.

The Grand Palace.
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After the palace, I had a bit of a fiasco with an ATM.  It malfunctioned and gave me 10, 000 baht instead of the 1,000 baht that I wanted (about $300 instead of $30).  I went into the bank and tried to tell them that there is no way that I could spend that kind of money here in a day, and they refused to put it back into my account. The only thing they could do was convert it into American dollars, for a price. Sigh.

I recovered from the shock of withdrawing 10, 000 of anything from an ATM, and went to see the reclining Buddha at the Wat Pho temples.  After that, I took a boat ride through the canals in Bagkok, and ended up at another beautiful temple (Wat Arun).

Me again.
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I have decided to do a tour in order to meet more people, so I am leaving for Cambodia tomorrow morning.  I wish I had more time to spend here though! I think I might cut my time in India a little bit shorter to come back to northern Thailand, or at least try to squeeze in a visit to Chiang Mai.

I am finally caught up on this blog, so I will write my next entry from Cambodia.