Adventures

Day 16 - Wat Pho

We started our second day in Bangkok with a bath in the hotel pool - our last chance before having to go back to Germany. Then we went shopping for some souvenir foodstuff, and packed up our backpacks one last time.

Afterwards we had still half a day to see more of Bangkok. We decided to give the Great Palace another try. This time we got to the entrance, but there was already a large queue in front of it. That and the high entrance fee of 500 Baht for foreign visitors (Thai people can visit for free) made us decide to skip this attraction.

Instead we visited the Temple of the reclining Buddha. That one is really famous. And of course there were many tourists. We took a lot at the buddha and we also took some pictures, but the figure was a bit too big to actually fit well. But we also enjoyed the rest of the temple complex. It had several other temples with golden buddhas in them. In one of the porticos there was information about the reglious culture of Thai people, how the golden buddha figurines are made, historical aspects and much more, which was all very interesting.

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Day 15 - First impressions of Bangkok

We had arrived in Bangkok in the evening, and by the time we had managed to get from the airport to the hotel* with the Airport Rail Link it was already pretty late. So when we got up early the next day to explore the city, we didn't really know what to expect. Many people we know had been to Bangkok, and many of them liked the city very much. We on the other hand somehow got off on the wrong foot. Maybe it's because we didn't read up enough before coming here. We got tricked and cheated almost everywhere we went, and there just weren't enough good things about Bangkok to really make up for it. But let's start at the beginning.

One thing we had read, was that taxi scams where as common here as in Vietnam, so we tried to avoid Taxis and TukTuks as much as possible. Instead we took the metro to the old town part of the city. But the metro doesn't really go anywhere near the old town, so we walked through most of chinatown. On the way we got stopped once by a guy, offering us advice on the sights and trying to hail us a TukTuk. We declined, explaining that we wanted to walk to take in as much of the city as possible, and quickly walked away.

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