Bangkok is madness

It took us a little while to get used to being in Bangkok - somehow, it is complete organized chaos! A lot of poverty and a lot of wealth all crammed in next to each other.

Every public place was shoulder to shoulder with other people

Heavy traffic and neon lights are the norm

 The air smells strongly of spicy Asian food (even in the airport when we landed) and it's hot as blazes. Most of the streets are crammed with vendor stalls that look like this:

And of course, the ever-present 7-11 up the street

Consequently, we came away from Bangkok with few pictures of the actual city because most of the time we were way too overwhelmed to pull out our camera.

We did get to see a few sights during our 5 days there. However, it was always exhausting to get out and see things because of the heat and the taxis. They have metered taxis, but when you are anywhere near the tourist part of town, they refuse to use the meters so they can get you to negotiate a higher price, usually double. So we could always get TO the tourist sights, but getting back home involved walking about an hour away to find a taxi that would use his meter. And Thai pronunciation is quite difficult, so it was a bit hard to communicate. Exhausting.

The fun part is that they also have tuk-tuks which are super fun to ride in, but also a little difficult to use because you have to negotiate a price with the driver first and you don't know how much a trip should cost, since you've never been there before and don't know how far away things are. So we always assumed his price would be double what it should cost and went from there.

This is like a Where's Waldo because you can see us in the backseat in his rearview mirrors

Riding along in our tuk-tuk

Bangkok does have a sky train/metro system, but it only gets you to newer parts of the city and the airport. They also have a completely mental bus "system" that makes no sense, and motorcycle taxis for one person - where you just hop on behind some dude on a motorcycle. So, needless to say, we found the task of getting around a little bit too much to undertake most days.

However, we will quickly admit that the people are very inventive and somehow make the craziness work. Especially in regards to the tuk-tuks and motorcycle taxis. It really is an ingenious solution to zip around a crowded city.  And the food stalls where you could order pad thai and they would whip it up for you fresh in about 30 seconds. It all somehow seems to work rather well.

The first thing we went to see was a temple called Wat Po, which has an enormous reclining golden Buddha.

The grounds of Wat Po palace

It's HUUUGE!

That's a big Buddha!

And some big tootsies!

The bottom of the feet were mother-of-pearl

We also wandered into a separate temple that had a huge Buddhist shrine and monks were coming in to say their prayers. We got to sit there and hear them do their chants, which was really cool; after 15 minutes they were still going strong.

Monks in the orange robes

The next day was Saturday, and most of the temples were closed. We needed a new cord for our laptop, so we set off on a mission to find one. Luckily, there are roughly 300 huge modern shopping malls in Bangkok, so we certainly didn't have any trouble finding electronic stores. After a while we found an ENTIRE mall that only sold electronics and they had the cord we needed. Before we made it there, however, we found Auntie Anne's pretzels and promptly inhaled ate 3 each

We heart soft pretzels

 We also found a Krispy Kreme, Mrs. Fields Cookies, and plenty of McDonalds. Just like any other western shopping mall.

A mall performance - the Backstreet Bangkok Boys

 They also had Christmas decorations up and had Christmas music playing. Pretty hilarious, since something like 96% of Thailand is Buddhist or Muslim... I guess it's for commercial purposes.

Merry Christmas from Thailand

So we ended up having a great time wandering the malls and being inside in the air-conditioning.

Monday we went to visit the Royal Palace (as a side note: Obama was in Bangkok over the same weekend and went to the Royal Palace and Wat Po on Sunday. We even saw his airplane at the airport when we flew out the next day)

Anyway, the Royal Palace was immense and we lost steam after a couple hours because of the heat. They had a strict dress code and we were both wearing shorts so I had to put on a skirt over my shorts and Brannan had to put on long pants over his shorts. I think they were made of pure wool because we were boiling. But still a really cool place to see.

Royal Palace

 Thailand used to be Siam, and many of the decorations looked very "Siamese". It reminded me of a lot of the scenery in the King and I.

Friend or foe?!

Who is really guarding this place? The elephants or the soldier?

Brannan's new pet elephant

The next day we hustled south to the slow-paced islands. We were ready to get out of the madness!  It was surprising that after having traveled for 3 months straight, we experienced so much culture shock and difficulty adjusting in Bangkok. Asia is definitely different than Europe!

P.s. despite what blogger says, this post was written by Melanie.