I HEART THAILAND

Bangkok, Day 1

We left Saigon in the morning to head for Bangkok. We just had time for a breakfast of runny eggs and bread, lots and lots of delicious crusty bread. In China, the bread is all sweet so I made it my mission to consume as many rolls of bread as I could while on vacation. I was very successful. yum.

We had only been in Thailand for an hour, when I came to the conclusion that I LOVE THAILAND!! It's warm, the people are very friendly, it's easy to get around, and the food is phenomenal. We got into Bangkok in the early afternoon and checked into our hotel, Villa Cha-Cha, which was pretty cute. It also came with an itemized list of how much everything in the hotel room would cost if we stole it. We were trying to figure out exactly how they thought someone would make it out of there with the chaise lounge, and figured it probably wouldn't be worth it. We stayed in the Khao San District, which is where a lot of the backpacking foreigners stay. We saw lots of them. It was a good spot though.

Since we only had a day there, we pretty much dropped our stuff and headed out. We went first to the Wat Pho, and were truly amazed. Everything is so ornate and beautiful. The coolest thing we saw that day, and in Bangkok altogether, was the Reclining Buddha. It's huge!! It's hard to even describe it without actually seeing it there. There were a lot of tourists, but there were also a lot of people praying as well. I felt like sort of an intruder in their lives, taking a picture and all, like they were some sort of novelty. After spending awhile there, we left to go to the Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew. However, it closes at 3:30 and we were about an hour too late. We decided to wake up real early the next morning to see it before we had to catch our plane. We did find that there was an Au Bon Pain across the street, where I was VERY excited to get a bagel and cream cheese for breakfast the next morning. We ended up just walking around the area, shopping and eating. Which is clearly emerging as a theme for my life. The evening was spent in our little neighborhood, eating, drinking and people watching.

The next morning we took a tuk tuk to Wat Phra Kaew and the Grand Palace and tried to see as much as we could in about an hour and a half or so. Again, huge, ornate, and very shiny. Missy forgot to wear sleeves and was given the super sweet standard issue short sleeve button up teal shirt. The hour and a half went very quick, consumed mostly by running around and taking 30,000 pictures. Roughly. We said we would go back to it at the tail end of our trip, but never made it.

From there we picked up our stuff, hopped on the bus, and were off to meet Meghan and Jessica in the Bangkok airport to head north to Chiang Mai.