Bangkok – Day Three
Day three in Bangkok was probably our most “touristish”. Except for an absolutely miserable dinner experience (read on), the day was quite fabulous.
We woke up at a reasonable hour, had some breakfast, and once again got some help from the people working at the hostel. Today was our day to go around and see some of the temples, as well as the Grand Palace.
After about 5 minutes of advice, we headed out to the SkyTrain again where we rode it out to the pier at the Chao Phraya River which winds its way North-South(ish) on the Western side of the city.
There are a dozen or so piers along the river which are frequented by “express boats” that are a form of commuting and transportation for the local Thai people. For the tourists, there is a “tourist boat” that you can take up and down the river that stops at 6 or 7 (can’t remember exactly) piers, and you can happily get on and off as many times as you like throughout the day. Once the tourist boat stops running, you can continue to use the commuter boats that everyone else uses, which is also quite a good time, especially during rush hour. But I digress…
So we took the boat as far North as they went, listened to the commentary, snapped some pictures along the river (which was brown…dirty…wow…) and tried to remain as close-mouthed as possible for not wanting icky river entering any of our facial orifices.
On the way back down, we hopped out at the pier where the Grand Palace was located, and headed on in. From a distance, I have to say, there are so many colors on this place that one almost things he must be walking into a gaudy life-sized piece of plastic touristy trinket thing. But man, once you get inside, whole other ballgame. This place is ornate. It is architecturally astounding. So much detail, absolutely fabulous statues, and murals painted all along the outside walls depicting epic battles, interesting creatures, fabulous masks, and brilliant landscape. I particularly liked a lot of the statues; I’m not sure why the masks appealed to me so much, except for maybe feeling that I look a bit like them?
You could probably spend an entire day in the palace area, and look at things over and over again, but we were on a tight timeline, and pretty soon everything starts to feel a little overwhelming. We would highly recommend this as a “must-see” type stop to anyone visiting Bangkok.
After our tour of the Grand Palace, we wandered back over to the pier and grabbed a boat to Wat Pho. This was another temple that Carly and I wanted to stop at, mostly because it also happened to be the location of a Thai massage school inside the temple grounds. The grounds here were a lot less crowded that that of the Grand Palace, and it was quite relaxing to just walk around, see the monks walking around, and not feel like we were running off anywhere in a hurry. This is also the location of a massive reclining Buddha that is housed in a building not much bigger than the statue itself. The statue is quite impressive to see, 45 meters in length, it makes Carly look short. This dude’s smile is 5 meters wide. That’s a lot of smile.
Along the back-side of this Buddha are 108 little pots where, if you so desire, you can throw a coin in each for good luck and long life and all that other stuff. We figured we didn’t need any luck, and I enjoy pizza too much to live too long, so we happily skipped that part and carried on with our meandering.
The statues here at this temple were also super-cool. They were not elaborately painted like those at the Grand Palace, looking a lot more like plain grayish concrete. But what made them kind of funky is that they almost all had western/European style top-hats.
Onto the Massage school; Carly and I chalked ourselves up for a 1 hour full-body Thai massage that set us back 300 Baht each (give or take CDN$8.50). The building in which they provided the massage was quite different than one might expect in that it was very communal… Yes, communal massage. You lay down next to John Smith on your left, and Jane Bob on your right, as your masseuse happily gives you your massage on what might as well be huge beds. Not an uncomfortable feeling, great smells wafted through the place from some type of flower they were steaming, and you could just lie down and relax. Now, Thai massage (this is the first massage I’ve ever had, so I have nothing to compare it to) is apparently quite different from a “normal” massage. They tend to use a lot of pressure points and manipulation of the joints and stretches. I rather enjoyed it, but Carly ended up sore and bruised (bruises easily from pressure on her skin).
After our massage, we were both starving (again) and wanted to head out to a place called All Gaengs (Gaeng is phonetically translated from Thai as “curry”), so we managed to get to the restaurant, but it was closed. We were horrified. Instead of going to one of the other Thai restaurants we passed along the way, we were for some reason dumb enough to go to a “recommended” restaurant that we passed about ½ a block up the street. It was a seafood place, and though neither of us are hugely into seafood, we thought we’d give it a shot. The place was called Somboon Seafood, I tried some Crab Curry (which was mediocre at best) and Carly had some chicken curry (which I think she classified as repulsive). Our appetizers were a deep fried Tofu (really…bad…idea…) and some spring rolls. The service was probably the worst we’ve ever experienced. I’m pretty sure that the worst service I’ve had at McDonald’s was still better than what we had here. C’est la vie.
After dinner we bailed back to the hostel and packed up our bags. It was gonna be an early morning (5:45am) to get to the airport for our flight to Krabi. More on that soon.
