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Bangkok - City of Blinding Wats February, 2008 |
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First off, the Grand Palace is spectacular. We spent most of one day just wandering around this and the surrounding Wats. Way too many pictures to post! The first two nights we stayed outside the old town and were able to visit some of the outlying attractions. Here we acquired our 30 day Laos visas, visited the Joe Louis Puppet Theatre. This was an amazing demonstration of puppetry, where three individuals control one puppet – not hidden behind a wall like a typical puppet show – but on stage. In this same area was a better than average night bazaar which had really nice handicrafts. Another day we
took a tour to Ayuttha, the ancient capital of Thailand. The bus left at
6:30 AM, stopped at four other amazing Another day was spent wandering the narrow alleys of Chinatown – everything is for sale here, somewhat overwhelming at times but that’s Bangkok. We were also able to, unfortunately, catch the Super Bowl. It started at 6:00 AM Monday morning at a bar downtown. Marge was pretty bummed afterwards and even an offer of shopping didn’t cheer her up. My heart was already broken a few weeks earlier when the Giants beat my Packers.
As it is, it takes about 3-4 hours to put together a blog and publish it to the web site. This includes sifting through the pictures, downloading the pictures, captioning the pictures, composing story line, inserting pictures into text, and finally publishing. Then, of course, I’m always doing housekeeping chores like backing up our pictures on my flash drive, deleting pictures we don’t need and so on. This is as much computer stuff I want in my life right now. So, next stop the charming border town of Nong Khai…
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Bangkok,
home to 10 million inhabitants, is one of those cities you either love
or hate. Having stayed here for six days, we have seen most of the
highlights, done a lot of walking, and are probably leaving at the right
time. After a while, all the sounds and smells assault your senses to
such a degree that you either surrender to it or decide to move on. 
Wats, before boarding us all on a boat for a four-hour cruise on the
river Chao Phraya back to our hotel. We both enjoyed this tour very much
(and we generally don’t do any tours at all). 
While
in Bangkok, we were able to purchase a small laptop which we had seen in
Singapore around Christmas, but were unable to get because of limited
inventory (the one place that carried them only had 200). Here at the
electronics mall we found one and snapped it up. It’s an Asus EEE, maybe
8 x 10 in size, very light, wireless compatible, 4GB hard drive, card
reader, Windows XP, MS Office – really, really slick and the best part
is the price - $365. So, if it gets lost somewhere along the way, it’s
not so painful. But check them out as they get introduced in America –
perfect for
