Day 216, Bangkok, Thailand
Still struggling to get everyone on to Thai time, we left the house early in the afternoon for lunch. Paul learned that medium spicy here produces profuse sweating. I ordered a mystery dish which ended up being soup with little fatty balls of chicken that still had a bone in the middle. Will not order that again. The girls nailed their orders and were pretty happy with what they got.
Thailand has the highest percentage of Buddhists than any other country in the world, and therefore, many temples. I’ve only ever seen the Buddhas standing or sitting. In addition to these, Wat Pho also has the famous reclining Buddha, which depicts him at the end of his illness as he prepared to enter Nirvana.
From there we took a taxi down to the most popular tourist attraction in Thailand, Wat Phra Chettuphon Wimonmangkhlaram Ratchaworamahawihan, or Wat Pho for those of us who can’t manage that. Our taxi driver took us on the scenic route all around the city, unrequested, and it still only cost $4.
Wat Pho is oldest temple in Thailand with the status of a Royal Monastery, and at the top of the list of Royal temples. It houses the largest number of Buddha images in Thailand including the famous Reclining Buddha which is 150 feet long. The temple was the first location of public education in Thailand, was the birthplace of Thai massage, and this has a Thai medicine school. I’ve never been to a place most interesting to photograph, so many angles, colors, unusual shapes.
There is still an active monastery on site. We saw quite a few younger monks running not to be late to their prayers. The most sacred building on site, and still used in Buddhist rituals, is Phra Ubosot (Phra Uposatha), or bot. This is the Ordination Hall.
From Pho Wat we had some familiar ice cream at Baskin Robbins while looking out over the Grand Palace walls. We’ll have to come back and do that another day. We stopped in a large park which had a bike path around it, to sit in the grass and watch people flying kites against the orange sunset over the Grand Palace temple peeks. One of those moments that has you wishing you could extend.
From there we walked to Khao San road, the where all roads for Thai tourists converge. It was like Santander in Guatemala times a hundred. Many noodle carts, where you choose the type of noodles, your meat, veggies, spices, and they wok it all up for you. I could live on this stuff. There are also many fresh fruit carts, Madi got a bag of mango, and fried bug carts. I had to get a picture of those, it was worth the 10 Bhat. There are places to get a Thai massage right on the street, henna tattoos (but not of Buddha), lots of elephant print pants. Cali got a pair of elephant print shorts. It’s a happy atmosphere, everyone’s on vacation. Surrounding the street are many hostel options, a large percentage of the world’s backpackers must be here at any given time. In front of the hostels you will see mounds of backpacks, and one tired person left on duty to watch the bags.
We ate at a well known outdoor Italian restaurant, rated 98th out of 10,000 restaurants. It wasn’t easy to find, since it was down some secret, tiny alley. Google maps was the only way we found it, trying to get move our blue dot to their green one. I got some stellar green curry, everyone was happy with their food choices. Lots of free range cat activity going on at any given time. That’s always entertaining.
We took a taxi home. Since we had negotiated a flat rate, he took us the direct route, took us a third of the time than when we came to the same location via meter.
After we got home, Paul and I went to the 7-11 so I could buy some cold coffee drinks for the morning. We were out of cash and apparently so was the cash machine. We tried using both Mastercard and Visa, but it was a no go. You have to put money on a special 7-11 card called Purse, which does no good if you have neither the card nor the cash to put on the card. I had to leave my coffee drinks behind. It was a sad moment, for sure. It was a full day and we were all tired. We managed to shut down the girls’ computers by midnight.