The Reclining Buddha

Day 1: First of all, it’s hot. Second of all, it’s hot. Third of all...well, it’s hot.
This is probably not a very exciting post; I promise that they'll get more exciting as things move on.

We visited the Grand Palace, the Emerald Buddha and the Reclining Buddha. I don't have very good pictures of any of these, but I'll post what I have. We also got a 45 minute foot massage, got lost 2 or 3 times and met a friend out for drinks. We started off the day with a very good western/Thai breakfast. It included bacon, eggs, shrimp fried rice and lots of fruit and fruit juices. The fruits here are amazing. Very tasty. And I don't even like fruit. Joanna had about 10 glasses of the pineapple juice.

After our filling breakfast, took a water taxi to the Grand Palace and the reclining Buddha. We actually got on the wrong water taxi and got off a stop too early. Either way, the stop is in the middle of the two sites we had to see. When we were outside of both temples, people would come up to us and tell us the temples were closed. Both the hotel folks and our guidebooks warned us that this would happen, so we just said that we were going to check them out anyway. It’s unclear why they do this. Really, it’s not like they offered to take us anywhere else.

Here is a link to a description about the Grand Palace:
http://bangkokmag.infothai.com/gp_palace.htm
Here is a link to a description of the Reclining Buddha: http://www.thailandguidebook.com/watpho01.html

After some site seeing, we searched for about an hour for a specific massage place. We walked up and down and back and forth. Finally, we saw the cardboard sign. It was good times and felt really good. We grabbed a late lunch/early dinner of, you guessed it, fried rice at a side restaurant and then headed back to the hotel.

After a short nap and a shower we headed out for drinks at a couple of hip clubs with Regina, a friend from school, who is working in Bangkok this summer. We went to the Met for a couple of hours. Regina tried to get us free drinks because she works for Diagio. It didn't work. Either way, it was a hip bar that didn't seem to be happening because, well it was a Monday night.

My impressions so far:
Thai folks are always smiling; they seem to be pretty good natured.
It’s hot. Our clothes were drenched in sweat.
As some of the pictures show, the temples and everything in them are very ornate and detailed. It’s amazing that so much detail was apparently put into something as seemingly insignificant as a box.

I'll try to get better with the pictures. We'll have more later.