December 19, 2006
Rest Day in Bangkok: Grand Palace
Today, we go with convenient transport: per taxi to the Grand Palace in the center of Bangkok. It's only about 160 Baht.
There is a dress code here, officially open toe shoes, shorts and "wife-beater" shirts are not allowed inside. It doesn't seem to be 100% enforced but some scruffy looking Farang (Thai for tourists) are sent back to get dressed, like the other tourists with funny looking pajama pants or sarongs. The light on the colorful monuments is beautiful and there aren't too many people yet. By 9:30am the tourist buses have arrived en masse and it gets crowded. Most tourists have only one mission: to get as many pictures as possible of themselves here.... using their pictures to see where they've been. Many are Chinese and Japanese tourist also seem to have some secret sign language that they use in their pictures, we see many interesting poses... We should not comment too much though since we are also clicking away, but our goal is to exclude tourists from our pics.
Next to the temple is the Grand Palace. We watch the changing of the guard and check out the buildings. After that we walk to Wat Pho next door, ignoring tourists' touts that tell us the temple is still closed and should go somewhere else instead. Wat Pho has many beautiful dedi's and a huge reclining Buddha. We spent about an hour and a half, then head north along the river towards the Amulet market that is also still closed if we would believe the tuk tuk drivers.
While Rachel browses the market, Patrick sits at the river pier and watch locals, back packers and large Asian tour groups. When Rachel returns with some more treasures, we take a riverboat upstream to Nonthaburi pier. We visited this place before on "our tour of the city" trying to find the City Hall.
For 50 baht we then take a tuk tuk ride back to Carrefour where we eat dinner in the food court. We also do some more shopping and head "home." We watch John Denver's Wildlife concert on DVD, catch up on email and read.
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