Thailand! Doing Our Own Thing

Day 4: After we heard from the tour leaders that our last day in Thailand would be spent at a snake farm and ANOTHER mall, my group decided to forfeit all of those FUN activities and go to the Grand Palace (where the king lives). It took a while to get there and it was SO SO SO SO HOT, but I'm glad we did it.

The ferry ride was very cool. I felt more like I was seeing THAILAND as opposed to being driven around and dropped off at various places in the hopes that we would buy stuff. Everything felt more authentic (like riding a ferry with Thai locals instead of a tour bus with other Hong Kong people) and the sights during the ride were very cool.



Also, the ferry was ghetto in that instead of it docking and having to put down a little bridge or whatever for people to get off/on, you just hopped over the ferry wall. And to prevent the noticeably dirty water from splashing on you there's this ghetto blue tarp attached to a rope that the passengers sitting in the side seats have to pull down. I loved it. Though the tarp is barely effective.

The riverbank was a lot like the side of the road on my trip to China: lots of little shacks lined up with the inhabitants' clothes hanging outside to dry. Very cool. Though no pics :(

So after the ferry ride we walked for what seemed like forever to get to the Grand Palace. I love the super wide roads in Bangkok:

There's huge pictures of the king EVERYWHERE. But maybe it's because we were on the way to his house.

So after the most grueling walk in my recent history we made it to the king's house! Here's a bunch of pictures:











I was a bit disgruntled because of the weather, so I didn't really try to take any amazing pictures. I regret that now, of course. :(

Of course all the buildings start to look the same (especially when it's 100+ degrees out), and I don't know if the buildings are for any specific purpose other than to look nice, but the architecture is what you think of when you think "Thailand", no?

When you visit the Grand Palace, you're not allowed to come in wearing shorts/showing your ankles/wearing tight pants/tanktops/etc. for religious reasons (I DEFINITELY would've worn shorts if I could've). Also, when you see the Emerald Buddha you have to take your shoes off, and you're not allowed to point your feet at the Buddha or take pictures of it. It was definitely very cool though. Very shiny.

After wandering around the Grand Palace for an hour or so, we had to head back to the mall the rest of the tour was at so we could catch a ride back to the hotel on the tour bus. We took another ferry from the Grand Palace to the more commercial area:



I kind of love ferry rides.

We had to take the BTS Skytrain, which is the Bangkok (Mass) Transport System, to get to the mall after the ferry ride. Looks a lot like BART. Except nicer.

BTS Skytrain ticket.

Here, have a cool Thailand building picture:


We made it back to the mall safe and sound, and were taken back to the hotel at around 7 and were left to do our own thing. We went back to the night market for some last chance Thai shopping. We spent half a day in the Bangkok International Airport waiting for our return trip to Hong Kong the next morning. Not very interesting.

So that concludes my Thailand trip. I'll probably be back later for some last thoughts, impressions, etc...

Thailand! Half A Wasted Day

Day 3: We got up at 7 again so we could leave Pattaya and head out to Bangkok. This is where the trip gets REALLY fun.

And by really fun I mean it was so boring I got angry. I was subjected to a one hour live infomercial of this old Chinese guy selling bee products. At first I thought we were going to a bee farm, but when we got there it was actually worse: NO BEES, JUST A MAN. SELLING HONEY AND BEE'S WAX. He gave us a LECTURE about where the bees come from, how great their honey is, the honey's awesome healing properties, the benefits of using honey on your face, etc. SUPER BORING. We did actually get to TRY the honey (it was alright, VERY sweet), some honey juice or something (I don't know exactly what that stuff was, is that bad?), and pollen? Or something?

It tasted like Golden Grahams, except not as good.

Stupid bees.

The reason tours are so cheap is that they take you to all of these stupid factories in the hopes of making up the money they lost by having you buy stupid bee, leather, jewelry, and food products. A lot of time was wasted going to these individual markets :/

I'm sure all of the food here was authentically Thai (they had durian and mangosteen candies, dried squid, etc...) but none of it was something I wouldn't be able to find at 99 Ranch Market.

Our last stop before reaching Thailand was to the monkey show/elephant ride! As you can see, I got to take a picture being buddy-buddy with a (obviously sleepy) monkey. Also take a look at this suave guy:

The show was actually pretty sad. They had the monkey on a chain around its neck and the "trainer" would just yank on the chain to make it do something. The poor monkey got choked a couple of times :( They also made it do stupid things like jump through a hoop surrounded by knives, and then one on fire. I guess it's supposed to be entertaining? But it just put me in a worse mood.

But I guess I'm kind of a hypocrite since after that I just hopped on an elephant for a ride around the park. I wonder if it hurts it at all to have three people riding on its back? I hope not...


BUT YEAH. I RODE AN ELEPHANT. Sorry, Elephant, for making you carry me around...

Anyway. Aside from that I rode in a donkey cart. It wasn't very interesting.

After that we made it to Bangkok. Our first stop there was an upscale mall. Yeah, pretty boring, I've seen too many in Hong Kong already. My group opted out of that to see the four faced Buddha instead:

It's a bit weird to have this worshiping place out in the open in the middle of the city, but I noticed that religion is more apparent in Thailand (guess I'm just not used to it living in America):

The first thing I thought of when we got to Bangkok was that it looks (and feels) a lot like Vegas. The weather and walkways and such.



We had dinner at the mall-I-didn't-buy-anything-at and then went to a night market in Bangkok. They sell clothes and trinkets and souvenirs and such (a lot like Chinatown at home or night markets in Hong Kong - except a lot more elephant-themed stuff) and everything is suuuuper cheap. I bought a couple of T-shirts for 100 baht or so, which is what? $3 USD or something?



Just some pictures of the the ride to the night market/the decorations around the night market. I'm particularly proud of that first one :)

Thailand! Beach Day!

Day 2: Probably my favorite day of the trip. We had to wake up at the crack of dawn (7 AM) to eat breakfast before heading out to the beach. Our first boat trip was to a floating...barge? I don't know, it was just some platform out in the middle of the water...

...Where we got to go...parasailing! It was 350 Baht (a little over 10 USD) and it was pretty AMAZING. We got strapped into a parachute and then attached to a boat, which took off while the guys working there told us in broken english to run (not like you consciously do it though, it's more like A GIVEN - you're attached to a boat!). The boat took a short drive around the floating platform with you 50 feet (more or less, I don't remember) in the air. Definitely something I'd want to do again.


You can't really tell, but that's totally me!

After that we got back on the boat and took a longer ride to an actual beach. I went jet-skiing and actually got to drive it! That was fun, except while we were coming back, the guy on the back of our jet-ski purposely drove in such a way that would get us SOAKED, while cheekily saying "oops". My other friends also jet-skied and when they got back, they were almost completely dry. Jerk.

Haha sorry for the quality, this is a picture of a picture.

We had a couple of hours to play around by ourselves or go shopping on the boardwalk before heading back to the hotel to get cleaned up. After getting back to the hotel, showering, and taking a nap, we were packed on the bus again to go to a restaurant that served shark fin soup and bird's nest stuff. Both of which I think I've had before (I'm not sure about the bird's nest, but I've definitely had shark's fin). Oh, and they wanted to charge 700 baht for this stuff. I didn't eat any, of course.

Anyway. After sitting around while other people were enjoying their 700 baht soup we went to get our one hour Thai massages. As Mommy already knows, I am EXTREMELY ticklish, so I spent the whole hour trying not to laugh (and failing miserably). They only massaged our feet and legs, and I felt worse after I left (seriously, I think I left with some new bruises), but the lady was nice and didn't mind when I laughed out of nowhere. Good experience I guess? Have a picture of an elephant at the Thai massage place:

Thailand really loves its elephants.

After that we went shopping again and had dinner (same as yesterday - except without tomyum soup). We ended the day early since everybody was probably tired from the beach, so we just went back to our hotel rooms and played games and stuff.

Thailand! Part 1!

So I got back from Thailand Tuesday night. It was ridiculously HOT. UM. Day 1!

Day 1: The plane ride was about 2 and a half hours from Hong Kong International Airport to Bangkok. Airports are pretty cool I guess. It's cool seeing the little cultural touches of whatever country you're in, even though most airports are all high-techish and look the same. I love anticipating what kind of plane food we'll get too, even though I'm disappointed 80% of the time. It wasn't bad this time though.



We got on the tour bus and headed straight for Pattaya, a city 165 km southeast of Bangkok, where we stayed for two nights. On the way we stopped at some kind of animal park that had some kind of obsession with mixing animals that don't belong together. They had some exhibit where they put a tiger, a huge pig, and two regular dogs in the same habitat. And they also had a HUGE, literally 6-foot-long pig nurse a bunch of tiger cubs. The tigers grew up nicer, or something. There was also pig racing, and this scorpion lady that just stands around all day with a bunch of scorpions on her shirt. Yeah. Lame.




I got a glimpse early on that some people are A-Okay with animal exploitation. All of the animals looked pretty unhappy. See this obese orangutan:

After the animals they took us to a "world famous" singing and dancing show. The majority of the performers are transvestites (none of the performers were women). Which is the only reason I paid 800 Baht for it. I wouldn't really say it was worth it. But I guess now I can say I've seen a tranny show in Thailand?





We had dinner at a restaurant across the street. Sadly, the food we ate here was the best of THE WHOLE TRIP, because the subsequent dinners were noticeably not as good. They weren't HORRIBLE, but this dinner was prettttttty good, probably because we had tomyum soup, which is a Thai specialty? I don't know, but it was really good.

After dinner we went shopping at a mall (I forgot the name already...) and the night market next door. There were a lot of transvestites walking around (I saw like, one in Bangkok). You can just TELL.

Oh, that's not a transvestite, I just wanted to show the mall. HAHAH.

I was pleasantly surprised by the hotel in Pattaya (not so much by the one in Bangkok). Except I can't understand why anyone would have a use for the window they put in the bathroom: