One Night In Bangkok (OK it was actually 7 nights)
Trip Start
Apr 01, 2011
1
65
73
Trip End
Jan 26, 2012
Bangkok, Thailand
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Bangkok is a big city. Larger than any other city we have been in before, with a population estimate ranging between 9 and 12 million people depending on who you ask and where you draw the boundaries. Luckily it does have a good rail transit system that can quickly and efficiently move people around the city. We decided on the first day that we would go into the old part of town and visit the royal palace and a few other sites. We figured out which train station was the closest to the palace and on the map, it looked like it would not be that long of a walk from the train station to the palace. So we set out on our journey and after walking what seemed like a very long time, we were still not even out of the shopping mall next to the train station! We found out later that what we thought was only a few blocks on the map was actually more like 10 kilometers. It’s a good thing that taxis are plentiful and cheap in Bangkok. The next day we set out again on our journey and this time we took the train to the river that runs through the city and got on a boat that took us down the river to the royal palace and Wat Pho, which is a royal Buddhist monastery in Bangkok. We joined the seemingly endless line of visitors weaving their way through Wat Pho, taking our shoes off to enter each building and putting them back on again to walk to the next building. One of the more interesting sights at Wat Pho is a gigantic gold covered statue of the Reclining Buddha that is 50 feet tall and 143 feet long. It was a very weird feeling walking around Wat Pho because it is a very important place of worship for the Buddhist population in Bangkok but also a major tourist attraction. So within the temples, there are many people worshiping and praying while they are pretty much the centerpiece of a three ring circus of tourists. It was interesting to see the Wat but it felt almost wrong to be a part of the hordes of people disturbing those who were praying.
Bangkok is home to the tallest building in Thailand, Baiyoke Tower which is 304 meters tall and has a rotating observation deck on the roof. We took a trip up to the roof to check out the view and it was pretty cool, then we grabbed a table by the windows at the bar on the 83rd floor and enjoyed a drink while staring out at the city below. I wanted to see how long it would take the elevator to go up 83 floors but unfortunately it stopped a couple times along the way to pick people up and drop them off. The longest non-stop elevator run we did was 54 floors and it took a minute and five seconds to do that so if my math is right (and it probably isn’t) the elevator was doing around 11 Km/hr and would take about 1 minute 40 seconds to go from the ground floor to the top.
Like slowing down to gawk at a car accident, we had to go check out Khao San Road. It’s a relatively short road that is jam packed with cheap backpacker hostels and hotels, cheap places to eat, stalls selling shoes, jewelry, pirated DVDs and CDs, knock-off brand-name clothes, massage places, fortune tellers and poor quality custom tailors. We managed to dodge all of the fortune tellers and touts trying to sell custom suits and found a pretty good Indian restaurant to have lunch at. After lunch, we stopped at a KFC for desert. I had seen that both Dairy Queen and KFC were advertising corn sundaes and I could not resist trying one. They are exactly what they sound like, a big scoop of canned corn in a sundae cup with soft ice cream on top of the corn and then the whole thing is topped with a generous helping of creamed corn. Sounds weird but actually tastes pretty good… Seriously!
Getting a taxi in Bangkok was sometimes quite a challenge. When we were on Khoa San Road and wanted to get a taxi to take us to the nearest train station, we ended up asking about 5 taxis to take us there before we got a driver that finally agreed to take us and use meter. Some said "no" and drove away, some quoted us a huge price for taking us to where we wanted to go and would not agree to use the meter. This played out quite a few times while we were in Bangkok. We were surprised that taxi drivers would sometimes refuse to take us to a place if we insisted on them using the meters, or if they didn't know where the location we wanted to go was.
The rest of the Thai food we tried in Bangkok was more of what we expected, rice with meat-based curries that were more often than not VERY spicy. It made it tough for Robin to find food seeing as she is vegetarian and doesn't like spicy food but I even found much of the food to be spicier than I could comfortably eat. Not to say they were not tasty, but I was crying most of the time when I was eating.
