Wat Pho chedi
A chedi, like a stupa, is a Buddhist building. These, at Wat Pho in Bangkok, were extra impressive under a mix of storm clouds and blue sky.
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Posts tagged bangkok
The Grand Palace
If recent entries seem more random than normal, it’s because they are. Windows 7 randomly selects one of the tens of thousands of pictures on my hard drive to use as my desktop background. Every few hours the image changes. Sometimes an image would pop up that I wanted to edit, but there was no way to find out the name or location of the photo. Then I found WPTargetDir on the net, installed it, and now I can quickly open and edit the image down to blog size with a quick Shift + Click. So the past week I’ve been doing just that.
Today this photo of The Grand Palace in Bangkok was selected by Windows 7 as my desktop background. We had the most beautiful of skies that day in Thailand last December.
Departing Bangkok
On our last morning in Bangkok I took the elevator to the top floor of the hotel in hopes of seeing the sunrise over the Bangkok skyline. Unfortunately, the windows were dirty and the Bangkok air was quite smoggy (for the first time–a morning wind took care of the smog on the other days).
The top floor of the hotel looked quite a bit different from the other floors. These must have been some sort of penthouse suites as you had to enter through a seperate set of glass doors to get to the special rooms. There were also sculptures and other decorations that the other floors didn’t have.
A guard also “prevented” entrance to this exclusive location. I put prevented in quotes because in actuality the guard was sound asleep, curled up in the fetal position on the floor (just out of range in the above photograph).
We split town and headed for the airport with a cab driver who refused to turn on his meter. He wanted more than we paid with the meter for the same ride we had on the way in. I told him I would pay what we paid with a meter on the way in. He didn’t complain and after dropping us off and getting paid he left us with a smile on his face.
The above photo is what happens in the Bangkok airport while dad is checking in.
As I mentioned before, the new, Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok is really nice–both inside and out. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded had they cut a few corners on the airport and spent the savings on fixing the sidewalks in downtown Bangkok.
Bangkok night
Night time came to our first full day in Thailand. After a refreshing (a bit too cold if you ask me) swim at the hotel we headed out for dinner…
…though not at McDonald’s. Notice that Ronald is doing the wai, a Thai form of greeting, thanking, etc. by putting your hands together near your neck and bowing a bit.
We ate at Sphinx, located at the end of Soi 4 off Silom Road. The food looked really good, and the free wonton appetizers were great, but this was my most disappointing meal in Thailand (and the most expensive).
We took a tuk tuk back to our hotel for only 20 baht (under $1). This was our first, and last, tuk tuk experience in Thailand, not that the experience was horrible. Tuk tuks in our next location (Phuket) were ridiculously priced so we never used them.
Road back to the Holiday Inn Silom Bangkok
Street food, like the above, was available all over the place. Ellie had a coconut, but we avoided meat that wasn’t cooked right in front of us. Amazingly enough, none of us got even a little bit sick during the nine days we were in Thailand. We didn’t drink the water, but we had plenty of ice.
The boat ride back down the Chao Phraya River had better views than the way up as the clouds and sun did a little dance behind Wat Arun.
Right on the river, near our pier, was the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The place is incredible. The above photo doesn’t do it justice. It probably didn’t hurt that we were hot, Bangkok was humid, and the inside was nicely air conditioned.
Further up the street we saw a street vendor making a killing thanks to the nearby school which had just let out.
The Grand Palace
I’ll wrap up Thailand’s Grand Palace today with another flurry of photos.
This Thai man was working on the grounds. The above, close-up shot doesn’t fully revel his environment so I went for a wide angle shot, below, as well.
Just like Denmark and Norway, the king of Thailand has his guards too.
Above is the Chakri Maha Prasat Hall. We didn’t see any live elephants in Bangkok, but we saw many in Phuket a few days later.
I caught these two hanging out on the grounds of the Grand Palace.
The place almost looks like Disneyland… Older and not so phony though…
These two, Thai Buddhist monks sported far larger, fancier, and more expensive camera equipment than my little TZ7.
This last structure is called the Aphorn Phimok Prasat Pavilion.