Bangkok...Round One

On our first of three seperate stays in Bangkok, we can categorically say that we LOVE this country. Thailand is amazing, in a completely different way than Japan was, in fact, the countries have very little in common at all. Thailand is a much more relaxed atmosphere, everything is up for negotiation-- and EVERYONE is trying to scam you out of something, but we still think it is such an incredible place. However, the streets are disgusting, the sidewalks are falling apart, and there are mangy dogs EVERYWHERE... today, three of them got in a fight two feet from our face, and while dave and I packed up our lunch and ran, all the locals just kept on with their conversations. I suppose they don't have traveler's insurance to deal with, but we mostly thought we were going to die.

Yesterday we had a great day, we went to see the Reclining Buddha, which is kind of far from us, but instead of taking a tuk-tuk or the train, we thought it would be fun to take the river taxi. It was really fun, sort of like a bus that floats down the river stopping at a bunch of different stops along the banks, and there is a guide talking over the loud speakers the whole time. There was this crazy lady (or so we thought) who walks around shaking this can and marking your tickets on the boat, who turned out to actually be collecting the 15 baht that the locals knew to pay, instead of our 250 baht tourist pass. There seem to be a lot of tourist rates around here, the good news is that even those are cheap!

At the reclining Buddha, it was really cool because it is the Largest Buddha in Thailand at over 150 meters long. The feet themselves were 10 meters-which promted Dave to switch shoes with him. The grounds themselves were weird, because they had a grade school that operated out of there. All of the classrooms were open, which we werent sure if it was for our benefit (to make more donations obviously) or for theirs, but it was cool to see how they taught. Mom I'm sure you could have swept in there and had them all adoring curious George before the day was over, and man were they well behaved. Not one of them looked up as hords of tourists passed by looking in and taking pictures.

After the Buddha we went to take Dave to his second suit fitting, and man are they looking sharp. He even shaved yesterday, so he went from hobo chic to Versace model in a matter of hours... he is putting together an informertial for his system as we speak. Set it and just try to forget it, baby!

This morning we have been wandering the city just looking around, we picked up some lunch from a couple of different street vendors, and went to this nice park. Then we almost got our face ripped off by dogs and decided to just keep walking. Well we are going to get daves suits finished up and then hop aboard a train for Chiang Mai now, we will keep you all up to date as soon as we have internet again! (Pictures to come soon!)