Bangkok is full of contradictions. It’s street stalls next to skyscraper malls, traffic with no obvious rules yet an undercurrent of order that allows you to walk out in front of it and have traffic swerve neatly around you. Very neatly. So neatly in fact that I often waited for a Thai local to cross first and kind of hurried off beside them. And it was fascinating and scary all at once.
We left first thing and walked down to the Nae Nam Chao Phraya (river) to catch a boat down the back canals (Khlongs) of Bangkok, seeing the parts of the old city unaffected by modern life. Except for Coke and Pepsi, naturally.
Kids swimming in the brown water would wave madly and everyone always had a smile as we sailed past, their back doors not much higher than the waterline. We pulled up at the pier just outsideWat Pho, hosting the largest and most holy Buddha in Thailand.The Golden Buddha is so big they actually built the temple around him, but there are hundreds of other Buddhas and statues built to honour various royals right throughout the site.
Our tour guide was great, I didn’t remember any of it, but the entire temple was magnificent. And you have to give credit to Buddism. Our guide showd us Chinese and Hindu statues, telling us that “Buddism is very flexible, we welcome everybody”. In fact, it is not a religion but a philosophy, has no unique creed, no single authority and no single sacred book, which is pretty awesome, especially when they’re so damn happy all the time. They even call the toilet “the happy room”, due to the state one is usually in when they exit 🙂
We had some free time in the afternoon to go to the mall and find the bits and pieces we needed before we left the city, including a good bottle of Thai whisky to help us get through the 15-hour train trip to Chiang Mai.
-Sarah
Sarah