T is For Thailand

Hi All, I know it has been a while since our last post. Please don't take that to mean we've been doing nothing. I'm going to skip over some of what we've been doing to get to the fun part. After all, we're retired (kinda) and need to take a vacation now and then. Thailand has been on both of our bucket lists so we figured it was time to get back into some travel and check it off the list.

We flew out of Houston on January 4 at 4 PM. About 25 hours later we landed in Bangkok with a couple hours spent in a Tokyo airport. That got us to Bangkok at 6 AM on the 6th. Fortunately we got some sleep on the flight so we were able to stay up all day and get our internal clocks pretty much acclimated to a 13 hour time change.

I could go into a lot of detail on our trip but will spare you and get to some of the pictures. We took quite a few, imagine that, so I'm going to do a separate post for each city we visited. First up Bangkok where we spent three days.

Here is the entrance to the hotel Susan booked us in for our nights in Bangkok, Sala Arun. Ever hear you can't tell a book by its cover?

Here is the view from our room's balcony.

And then at night

To keep us up and moving our first day we walked around some markets close to the hotel and then had a tuk tuk take us around to some of the Buddhist Temples in Bangkok. Your first impression is that there sure are a lot of Buddhist Temples, they seem to be everywhere. Because they are. But if you were compare it to the population of churches in a city here, at least in the south, I'm not sure it would be all that different. Except for the size.

The second day we visited the floating market at Damoen Saduak and the umbrella market at Samut Songhram. The "umbrella" in umbrella market refers to the awnings in front of the small individual stands where vendors are selling their goods. Here you are mostly talking fresh fruit, vegetables and meat.

Here is Susan checking out some of the groceries for sale.

Did you notice the metal rail on the ground? Twice a day the vendors pull in their "umbrellas" to let the train pass.



When you hear (or read) floating market you would think the market was on water and floating, right? Not so. We were the ones floating. I had a video I took from our boat but it didn't really turn out very well so I'm going to skip it.

Our third and final day in Bangkok was spent with a walking tour guide, Mr Tee. He took us around to see the Grand Palace as well as the Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho.

The Grand Palace, the King's residence, has its own temple.

The Reclinig Buddha is 49 feet tall and 150 feet long, covered in gold leaf. It is the largest Reclining Buddha image in Bangkok but only the third largest in Thailand.

We thoroughly enjoyed our day with Mr. Tee so we invited him up to the rooftop bar at our hotel for a beer.

Our last night in Bangkok we went to Khaosan Road which is famous for it's night market and being close to where many young backpackers find rooms. We were told by some to avoid the street food in Thailand. We couldn't disagree more. It was very inexpensive and very good. We were told many Thai don't cook at home, they stop and pick up street food to and from work each day.

Khaosan Road

That's all for now. The next post will be Sukhothai.

Brian