City streets

Our first morning in Bangkok we set out exploring.  It was hot, humid, and felt like there could be a thunderstorm at any minute.  Our first order of business was finding something to eat.  We were stoked because we both LOVE Thai food and were so ready to try the real deal.  And what we found did not disappoint.  We ended up at a vegetarian restaurant (and cooking school, but more on that later!) and had our first (of many) wonderful Thai meals.  Absolutely delicious.

Bangkok is an interesting city.  It has it’s own particular smell to start with.  A kind of combination between tasty, tasty Thai cooking and open sewers.  It’s not the cleanest city and it is extremely hazardous trying to cross the street.  In fact we would walk several blocks out of our way in order to cross the street sometimes.  But, everyone is very friendly and we found it to have a really good feel to it.  And did I mention that the food is AMAZING?!

After breakfast (so around 1 pm) we set out with our trusty tourist map to try to see the city.

Monitor Lizard - our first Thai wildlife spotting experience, right in the city

We thought that the royal palace would be a good place to start, but had some trouble finding it.  Since we’d been walking for 20 minutes we were covered in sweat and standing on a street corner arguing about our map and thinking that the day was maybe not turning out so well.  That is when we got our first taste of how nice people are in Thailand.

A man came up and asked us if we were lost and where we were going.  We were immediately suspicious, but he told us that he works in the National Museum and wanted to help us out finding our way.  He also told us that the Royal Palace would be closed in a short time and since it is expensive we would be better off going another day.  Then he pointed out four other places of interest on our map, hailed us a tuk-tuk and bargained for the price for us.  Before we knew what had happened we had a driver taking us to four different places and waiting for us while we explored and for the local price!  Locals can pretty much always get lower prices than tourists.  In this case we paid about US $3 for about four hours of the guy’s time.

Three of the places we went to were temples and I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Dragon decorations at one of the temples

Justin and the first temple of the day

Beautiful!

A giant doorway

Enormous Golden Buddha

Flowers

At the second temple we saw, we were looking at a Buddha statue when another man came up to us and started asking us questions.  Again, we were a little put on our guard, but it turned out that he was a member of the tourist police (although not in a uniform) and wanted to make sure that we were having a good time, finding our way ok and not being ripped off by our tuk-tuk driver!  This has never happened to us before or since and we kept thinking it was going to be some kind of scam.  But he was just a really nice guy and gave us a lot of information about the temple and the resources the city has for tourists.

Cool stained glass

Stunning white buildings

Temple Grounds

The light is a little better on this one

By the end of the third temple we were pretty hot and exhausted and thinking a thunderstorm could start at any minute.  We have a water whenever, no matter what it costs policy, but even that wasn’t enough to save us from this heat.  Our last stop was the tourist information office, but it wasn’t very productive since we were just ready to crash.

This was our wonderful introduction to Thailand.  We never made it to the Royal Palace though.