Bangkok, Thailand
If you saw my video on facebook, then you already know – I’m melting.
The heat here is oppressive. Like it burns from the inside out and you can’t catch your breath because the humidity is already 100% at 9 am. And the local people are just walking around in long sleeves, drinking hot tea and admiring the Christmas tree in the mall because its freaking winter here!
Day One is down and I, literally, can. . .not. . . even. We’ve had to rearrange the whole itinerary to cut back on walking, avoid mid-day sun exposure and find a way to not just flat out fall over in the street.
Yesterday morning, we were up and out around 9:30 and it was already pushing 90 degrees. We had wanted to do a walking tour to get acclimated to the city (we had trouble finding one and now I know why) but that wasn’t happening. Instead, we found a hop-on/hop-off river ferry that taxis you up and down the Chao Phraya River, running through the center of Bangkok. To be honest, the river isn’t that great of a site. It’s brown and muddy and the river banks are this weird mixture of industrialized skyscrapers with traditional temples and run-down houses here and there.
What was a great site, however was the Wat Arun (or Temple of Dawn), which we enjoyed visiting even in the sweltering heat. The Wat Arun is a Buddhist stupa (like a monument), named after a Hindu God – there have been numerous restorations and revitalizations in its history – but i guess it was technically built in the 19th century.
Near the Wat Arun was another temple – I won’t even pretend to remember the name. It was must less crowded and we were actually able to go inside (once we removed our shoes) and sit beneath a Buddha statue next to a smiling bald-headed monk dressed in bright orange.
We’ve seen a lot of Buddhist monks and nuns so far. The monks can’t touch women and one who we encountered on a narrow alley completely stopped walking until I was well out of the way, pressed against a wall, before passing.
Speaking of religious things – here is an interesting distinction we’ve found. Buddha key chains, decoration and figurines were for sale all over Hong Kong. Here in Bangkok, as soon as we arrived in the airport we started seeing signs instructing tourist not to purchase Buddha decor or get Buddha tattoos indicating it is disrespectful and insinuating it is against the law.
Later in the day we stopped a riverside cafe for a cold drinks while we waited for the ferry to take us to the BTS or sky train station – which is the really clean and navigable mass transit system here.
Next, we visited Terminal 21 mall with the primary goal of getting Josh a new swimsuit as his has a hole.
I won’t embarrass him with all the details of trial and error, but let’s just say we struggled at one of the biggest malls in the world to find a swimsuit in his size. A Thai XXL is probably a US M and that was too small. Josh was able to finally find some way overpriced swimsuit-ish athletic shorts at the Addidas store. But they weren’t ideal
I’ll close with saying: Who wears short shorts? Josh, now, wears short shorts.
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