… and the world really IS your oyster!

But seriously though, even three nights here is nowhere near enough. Lucky for us… we’re coming back! We actually weren’t even planning on visiting Thailand until Feb/March, but since you can only fly to like, two places from Bhutan (that’s an exaggeration… it’s more like six…) and we needed to get closer to our next destination (Hong Kong), we figured… why not kick it in Bangkok for a few days?

Miles walked:                    27
Miles transported:        ~1,200

Arrived in Bangkok to find the streets beautifully decorated and lit up in preparation for the King’s Birthday:

Democracy Monument:

Kicked off our first day in Bangkok by visiting the Chatuchak Weekend Market. Found this awesome little “restaurant” tucked away somewhere in the middle of the market:

Francy purchased his first ORIGINAL Red Bull (yup yup… believe it or not, Red Bull actually originated in Thailand):

Walked around the nearby park and then found a nice little spot to relax from our very busy and stressful day:

Headed to Pantip Plaza, the “tech world” of Bangkok. Our Surface 3 keyboard had broken the night before and there’s no way I could (or rather, would) continue blogging without one, so where better to find a keyboard than THIS place??

Bonus – The keyboard came with Thai letters:

The escalators were out so they had this sign up… for anyone who is familiar with the Mitch Hedberg bit, you’re welcome:

Next top – MBK Center. This is an EIGHT story mall that, well, you just have to go see to understand. It was so overwhelming (and neither of us are shoppers in the slightest), that we couldn’t spend more than 20 minutes inside:

Headed back to our hotel to get ready for a fun night our on Khao San Road. Saw this cool graffiti:

And this awesome signage. You can’t see #4 very well, but it says “get a tattoo”. Sounds sanitary.

The best kind of dinners are cooked right on the street:

And the same holds true for massages, apparently:

This is so awesome, I don’t even need a caption for it (read: I couldn’t come up with anything funny to write here):

Opted in for the famous Thai buckets:

Which resulted in this:

SO reassuring. Thank you, Thailand:

Day 2 – set off to do some REAL sightseeing. Sure enough, we got scammed. And we knew we were getting scammed as we were getting scammed. It’s a pretty popular scam in Bangkok, too, so, you know… go us. Some other lovely couple we just stumbled across on the web describes the beautifully elaborate scam perfectly well here, if you want to read about it. Lucky for us, we didn’t end up paying a dime, escaped the clothing stores in less than 5 minutes and made it VERY clear to the tuk-tuk driver that we would not be buying anything, after which he totally ditched us at the Giant Buddha Temple, which was only a 20 minute walk away from where we started. So all in all, we lost about an hour and zero Bhat… could be worse. But hey, lesson learned! AND we got to ride in a tuk-tuk for free!!

And saw the Big Buddha (105 ft high) at Wat Intharawihan:

Came outside to find our tuk-tuk had vanished into thin air. After pretending to be concerned for 17 seconds, we went to a café, had a delicious coffee, then continued on with our original temple-sightseeing plans for the day, starting with this cool statue (we don’t actually know what it is, only that it’s cool):

Then decided to pay a visit to the Grand Palace:

Where some sort of military ceremony was taking place:

We didn’t actually go INSIDE the Grand Palace for the following reasons:

1. It was about to close.
2. A tour guide there told us to come at an earlier time of the day when “there are less Chinese people” (I’m not kidding… these are the exact words she said to us).
3. It was pretty expensive for a tourist site and as we knew we’d be coming back to Bangkok with Ryan and Katie (yayyy!!!!!!!!) and since we would for sure be hitting this site then, we thought it wise to wait. Yes, yes… we are THAT cheap.
4. Apparently a shawl is NOT enough to modestly cover your upper body in the Grand Palace, so they were making me walk ALL the way back to the entrance to borrow a cover up and then ALL the way back to the palace entrance. This excess walking was simply unacceptable and the major contributing factor in our decision to turn around. Yes, yes… we are THAT lazy.

So… we hit up Wat Pho – The Temple of the Reclining Buddha:

Walked around the temple for a bit:

Samsonite wanted us to take some ridiculous photos of him (the lengths we’ll go to for that turtle):

Finished our day of sight-seeing (and naively falling for scams) by taking a boat/bus back to our hotel:

Last morning of our far too brief visit in Bangkok before heading off for Hong Kong! My standard breakfast – beef noodle soup. Breakfast of champions:

And finally, saw this dude with the most insane hair ever. I’ll just let you guess where these two boys are from…