A WARM Thai Welcome

After a very bittersweet goodbye to New Zealand, we set off on a long day of travel to Thailand.  It was truly a warm welcome when we stepped off the plane into 95 degree heat at 1:00am.  We wanted to avoid learning to haggle with taxi drivers at that time of the night so we had pre booked a car to our hotel.  Once we arrived at the hotel, we quickly learned that like NYC, Bangkok is also a city that never sleeps.  At well past two in the morning, things were quite lively in the neighborhood around our hotel.  Thankfully our room was quiet, and after a period of hostel living and quick moving in New Zealand, true hotel accommodation for four nights in a row was very appreciated!  Also much appreciated was the Thai Massage spa right in our hotel lobby.  There are hundreds of these all over the city and for $7 US an hour, who can say no.  As cheap as it sounds, these are as nice as any massage spa we have used in NYC and the employees are trained very well in the various treatments.

The hotel provided a great western style breakfast every morning, along with a few more adventurous options.  While we can certainly appreciate having breakfast for dinner once in a while, neither of us like having dinner for breakfast.  Eggs and toast will always win out over noodle soup and fried rice at 8am!  That said, the rest of our days and nights were spent exploring a plethora of Thai food options from restaurants and street vendors.

Thai iced tea...AMAZING!  And they even came up with this nifty cup holder.

Papaya Salad cart!

You can get any kind of meat on a stick you could imagine.

So with full bellies we set off to let the city of Bangkok completely overwhelm us.  From sights and sounds to smells and tastes we were blown away.  One minute you can smell the most delicious food and the next step all you smell is trash.  There were absolutely stunning temples on one side of the street and destitute shanty neighborhoods around the corner.  Everything in this city was a contradiction. 

We took a ferry ride along the Chao Phraya river to see different neighborhoods and then tried a fish spa.  If you've never heard of this it is when you dangle your feet in water and little fish come up and eat the dead skin off of them.  Christine was very excited to do this and Wes was willing to try, so they rinsed our feet and down we sat.  We are sad to say we lasted all of 3 seconds before we both looked at each and said "No way! We can't do this!"  It was a very bizarre feeling having dozens of fish attack dead skin on your feet and legs and tickled quite a bit too.  We’re pretty sure we were the amusement of the day for the attendants, as well as a couple people watching from the sidewalk!  For the remainder of our time in the city, we constantly stopped to watch others participate in this.  Usually they were reading a magazine, on their phone, or generally looking unfazed.  They were certainly braver than us or maybe we had especially hungry fish!  Take a look at this Youtube video.  We'll just say that we were both a bit more dramatic than this guy was...

Most of our second day was spent visiting Buddhist temples Wat Pho and Wat Phra Kaew inside the grounds of the royal palace.  Inside these we saw some of the worlds more famous Buddha representations, the Emerald Buddha and the Reclining Buddha.  The outer finish of glass mosaic tiles and gold foil on most of the temples looks incredible in the sunlight.  Also on the palace grounds was a Thai military firearms exhibit.  As most of the items were originally from the US or UK, Wes enthralled Christine with more firearms history stories than she ever wanted to hear!  As if Bangkok wasn’t warm enough already, we spent the day in long pants and long sleeves to adhere to temple dress codes.  In between temple visits, we patronized every 7-11 we could find (and that’s not hard in Bangkok) as they seem to have the best air conditioning!  Lets just say that a cool shower was extremely welcome at the end of the day and laundry was necessary. 

The people of Bangkok were generally very welcoming, friendly, and willing to help.  Most people speak a bit of English and are excited to try it out with you, definitely when they want to sell you something.  We’ve never been offered more Tuk-Tuk rides in our lives (the areas motorcycle based version of a taxi) and wish that it were that easy in New York sometimes!  Before leaving home we had read many articles regarding personal safety and scams in the area.  We were cautious, as we always are when traveling, and most anything negative was avoided with a bit of common sense.  At no time day or night did we feel the least bit unsafe.  That said, Bangkok is not for the gullible. 

All in all we are still up in the air on our thoughts of Bangkok.  We have been able to quickly form a general opinion of most cities we have visited but this one proved challenging.  We really loved some parts and weren't too keen on others.  We are very glad to have had an experience there but we don’t believe it will become our favorite vacation destination.

And off to the north of Thailand we went, Chiang Mai and the city of markets!