Weekend in Bangkok

Two weekends ago (October 3-5) I went to Bangkok to meet up with my friend Amanda.  Amanda and I have been in a book club together the last 3 years in Boston, and for the last 3 months she has been doing a rotation in Deloitte's India office.  As it is approaching the end of her three months, I reached out to check in and see how things were going, and she told me she was going to be in Bangkok for the weekend.  I jumped on that opportunity since Bangkok is one of the few cities you can get a direct flight to from Luang Prabang.

Getting out of Luang Prabang was a slight headache. In order to stay in Laos for an extended period of time, you need to renew your visa every 30 days, and every day you are late there is a $10 fee.  Three weeks earlier I had brought my visa to the office and someone at PoP brought it to the Department of Immigration to get it renewed.  However, when I got to the airport to leave for Bangkok, the passport control men could not find the renewed visa, and I couldn't either.  Even though PoP had paid for a new visa, the Immigration officers did not stamp my passport with the new date, so according to my passport I had overstayed my visa by 25 days (aka $250 worth of fees).  After calling people from work frantically and worrying I was going to miss my flight, I paid for the fee out of pocket (to be reimbursed later thank god) and hurried through security. I was very upset and frustrated that this happened, and the last thing I wanted to do at that point was jump on a flight and sit in my frustration for 2 hours. 

Thankfully, guess who I sat next to on the flight! A guy from Boston! What are the odds.  We talked through the whole flight which helped me relax and put things into perspective again.  My new friends name is Andrew and he lives in the North End. He graduated college a year after me and he is now working for a travel company, so he has been travelling around South East Asia for the past month getting information to tell his clients (what hotels are good, what to see, etc). It was a lot of fun to talk about Boston and share travel stories of South East Asia.  And to make the world even smaller - we actually knew someone in common! A girl I played field hockey with at Union went to high school with Andrew. Weird.

When I arrived in Bangkok, I hopped on the train to get downtown. I was told that the airport is very far away from the city so its best to take a train to the city, and then a taxi from there to get to my hotel.  My sister Lauren told me I was most likely going to have culture shock going to Bangkok because it was such a big city and very modern in some aspects - and she was very right - my culture shock had begun.  I was thoroughly impressed with how modern Bangkok's train system was.  First of all, it was so much smoother than Boston's T-system - I barely had to hang onto the poles and it was so quite.  I got to the amazingly beautiful hotel and finally met up with Amanda and her friend Nina from work. 

Amanda and I at dinner on Friday night. We went to a sketchy restaurant under the highway overpass near our hotel. Good, cheap food though!

Me at the Bridge over the River Kuay

On Saturday we had a 4:30am pick up to go to the tiger temple!  We were picked up at our hotel by our tour guide and were ushered into a van with plush, leather, reclining seats. Thank goodness - we all needed to nap after getting only 4 hours of sleep the night before.

Nina on the bridge

Our first stop was at the Bridge over the River Kuay.  A railroad was built through Laos into China and many many prisoners died from working on the railroad (including US and Australian prisoners).  There was a book and movie made about the horrific number of deaths that occurred, but I have not seen the movie so I didn't really have any appreciation for this stop.


We next went to the Tiger Temple.  We first gave alms to the monks, which is a daily ritual for Buddhists (it happens in Laos too). As Buddhists are not supposed to have any possessions, the food that they receive during the Alms Ceremony every morning is the only food they have to eat all day - usually only 1 meal.  Women are not supposed to touch the monks or their bowl, so when we put the food into their little bowls we had to be very careful - I was kind of tossing my food packages into the bowls.  After this, we went to see the Tigers. There was a number of activities on our itinerary

1) Feed the baby tigers

Yes this is still considered a baby... you can tell by my face I'm kinda freaked out!

The monks are eating breakfast behind us

2) Walk the baby tigers - I'm having trouble locating a picture of this. One might come in the future.

3) Bathe the teenage tigers

They got a treat (chicken drumstick) as a treat for behaving well during the bath

4) Play with the teenage tigers - We held long bamboo poles with blown up garbage bags or shoes on the end. Its to get the tigers to jump and use their back legs.

5) Walk a full grown tiger

6) Have a 5 year old tiger's head on our lap

7) Watch the tigers play together in the water

After the tigers, we drove to see the elephants! This was my favorite part of the whole day.  Our elephants names were Miss Apple and Miss Universe.  We first fed them bananas and pineapples then went down to the river to start our bathing process (aka playing in the water). Similar to the tigers we had a few things on our itinerary:

1) Climb on them bare back

2) On verbal command (the elephants know Burmese!) they sprayed us

3) On verbal command they dunked us and you had to try and stay on

4) Water fight

5) Sit on its trunk

6) Photo time!

7) Then we rode the elephant bareback back to the camp

Back in Bangkok that night, we went to Khoa San Road which is a top tourist attraction.  It is in the Old City and a very touristy area. According to my guide book,  Khao San Road is the scene where East and West collide. There were clubs pumping music, eclectic market stalls, and great street food vendors.  Street pad thai - I could never get tired of that.  We had an early night on Saturday because of our super early wake up call that morning.

Amanda and Nina at Khao San Road

On Sunday, we went to a mall to get "safe" street-food. It was a huge gourmet food court with all the delicacies you could find on the street, but you know the hygiene was top notch and you wouldn't get sick from any of it. This way, we could be a little bit more adventurous and get sausages and other grilled meats.  I personally would prefer to eat just on the side of the road, but it was a nice feeling knowing I wouldn't get sick.  We then headed to Chatuchak market - The 35-acre (68-rai) area of Chatuchak is home to more than 8,000 market stalls. On a typical weekend, more than 200,000 visitors come here to sift through the goods.  Some of the stalls are so nice that they have air-conditioning! I bought 2 nice shirts for $3 each, 2 big mugs (Lao mugs are so tiny!), and some food. 

Sunday night we had scheduled a city bike tour. I'm not going to lie, biking in Bangkok scared the living day-lights out of me, but luckily biking comes second nature to me so I at least felt relatively safe.  However, someone in our group had not ridden a bike in many many years and had a collision with a car.  Luckily she was ok and she was just embarrassed and shaken by the ordeal.  She was a trooper though and kept going through the rest of the tour! We went to Wat Arun (Arun Temple), Wat Pho (Pho Temple), and the flower market that only happens at night. (Also photos might be coming if I can find them)

Monday morning we went to the airport together and went our separate ways after a very fun and tiring weekend.