a day in bangkok

So, it turns out that being in Bangkok isn't such a bad thing after all. The trick was realizing that I needed to escape the tourist ghetto of Banglamphu. While it happens to be quite cozy around streets such as Soi Rambuttri where my hostel is, it's effectively a fantasyland of sorts, made for tourists given the expectations of tourists, and thus allows you to miss out on what's special about thailand itself. So instead I walked for about 45 minutes, eating a questionable but tasty lunch made a little too spicy by liberal application of thailand's special spice, peppers marinated in soy sauce; found an excellent temple with very intriguing chinese style decorations, including some octagonal pagodas and even some chinese looking drawings of people; a flea market populated almost entirely by locals with good drinks sold on the side; and then the royal palace, with thousands of armed police loitering in front; and finally to vimanmek museum. I was really tired at that point and was grumpy about being forced to change into long trousers but it was quite a fun excursion. I took a tuktuk back out of tiredness. At night I planned on wandering to sukhumvit but I slept until like 8:30 and instead was resigned to dinner n the tourist stretch until I decided to walk outside for a bit, and went past a restaurant with signs entirely in thai that was just packed. Fortunately one waiter stopped me and told me it was a vietnamese place! oh, well I know what to order then - pho! It was quite different from the vietnamese variant, without as many vegetable leafy things and with slices of sausage. But with the addition of some atomic spices that looked like the chinese variety but proved to be more potent, it was delicious, made even better because they were selling loaves of bread for a buck a piece! I bought two, one that I dipped in pho and ate, the other that I saved for breakfast this morning. Yumyumyum.

Today I was thinking about going on a big adventure, but I'm headed to the airport at 3 so instead I'm checking the royal barges museum out and then going over to chinatown/indiatown (they have real names, I just forget them) for lunch. I filled up my camera with pictures yesterday, so if I can get a new computer charger, you can look forward to those...800 pictures in 42 days of traveling.

I suppose that at the tail-end of my journey it's starting to dawn on me how much I've learned about this part of the world in the last month. At times it's seemed a bit remote, at others foolhardy (I clearly do not have the budget to afford this trip). All the same, though, this has to have been an opportunity worth taking. And it leaves already plotting what I'll do if I get the chance to come back through this part of the world...