I'm back in the home of the free, land of the brave. It took me a bit to get rid of the jet lag and adjust back to USA life but I'm finally feeling like blogging again so here begins the story of Thailand!
Dale and I were lucky enough to redeem miles for our trip to Thailand and even doing that we managed to get a direct flight to Bangkok from Stockholm. This meant a 6 am landing in Bangkok, but we were even luckier and our hotel let us check in that early and we took a quick nap before heading out to explore Bangkok. First stop was Lumphini Park, a nice big park in the middle of Bangkok where we took a nice walk and saw the King Rama VI statue.
And we sat and watched the monitor lizards swim in the water and crawl onto land. They are pretty cool but the girlie girl in me was a bit creeped out by them.
As we were leaving the park I spotted this beautiful tree and I just had to snap a picture of it. I'm not certain why this tree is decorated but I just loved all the bright colors and 'fanta offerings' at the base!
Next we hopped in a tuk tuk to go back towards our hotel but alas we fell victim to the age old scam of being driven where the driver wanted to go, not where we asked. The good news is, we were taken to a tailor and we were hesitant at first since the tuk tuk had taken us there. But everything in the shop seemed legit. We got to see the fabric, see where the suits were being made, all the stops. So, despite our tuk tuk hesitance, Dale took the leap and ordered not one but two tailored suits. We left the store not confident he would ever receive the suits which we were supposed to pick up on our way out of Bangkok three weeks later. At the very worst, we figured we would have a good story! You'll have to tune in later to see what happened when we returned to the shop to pick up the suits! Now the tuk tuk driver was satisfied and returned us to our hotel. Bangkok puts on a big firework show for New Years but we were already feeling jet lagged and overwhelmed processing all things Bangkok/Thai. So, we opted to celebrate New Years in our hotel neighborhood of Sukhumvit Soi 11. Here's a picture of the neighborhood.
And another view from the subway ramp looking down at all the electrical wires. It's amazing how much the city changes so drastically from one block to another. Sometimes not even in a block! Bangkok has these ridiculously big high end shopping malls that are super fancy and then right outside it's slums. Incredible. But anyway, I digress. All of the wires everywhere fascinated and scared me. As you walk around you can literally hear the buzzing of the wires. Not sure that's so safe.
While walking around the neighborhood we also saw men with caged birds which were for sale for immediate release. I believe they do this to make a wish but I'm not certain. We watched one lady buy and release. I'm skeptical they are trained to fly right back for capture and release again but we didn't see the birds hang around so who knows.
We did find (no shortage of) bars on the street. Literally, cars parked on the street and put tables and chairs out front and served you drinks or, like in the picture below, they became the bar. Dale and I were highly amused by this (which would never be legal in the land of the free) and sat down for a drink. We almost immediately made friends with a British couple living in Bangkok who loved the VW bus bar almost as much as us and we ended up staying there for a while chatting with them.
We finished the night watching the fireworks from a distance and headed home for some much needed sleep. And that concludes day one of our Thailand adventure. I hope to blog soon with more of the trip!
Love Always,Matilda
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