Chakri Day

Today was national holiday, Chakri Day--when I asked the significance of the day all I got in return was "It's a Buddhist Holiday". As a result of the holiday, I did not start work. Instead, I had the opportunity to explore part of the city. After breakfast Chris & I took one of the local buses to the other side of the river where most of the city lies. We planned on exploring the Bangalamphu area; however, we ended up in a tuktuk with plans to visit many of the city's Buddha's since all of the temples were open for free for the day. While this sounds very benign, especially since the government was sponsoring a pro-tuktuk day by setting the price for taking one at 20bhat, it wasn't. We ended up going to the Temple of the Lucky Buddha, then spent probably 45min traveling to a suit shop where we were supposed to look around for 15min so that the driver could get free gas. We did not really have anything to look at since it was a very expensive custom made suit shop (& there were no suits to look at), so we left w/in 5min & apparently he didn't qualify to get his gas. He then took us to the Temple of the Standing Buddha...seemed ok at this point; however, when we left that temple we spent well over an hour going to a tourist agency which was trying to sell a package weekend for the Thai New Year (next weekend), then he took us to a jewlry shop--refusing to take us to any more temples until we went in--well apparently we didn' t stay there long enough either. Finally we refused to go to anymore shops & he got upset until Chris offered to pay 200x the original price for him to take us back to where he picked us up at. While the first hour was entertaining, I have to say riding in tuktuks is very hot, dirty, and you get to inhale all of the exhaust of the traffic (for those who don't know what a tuktuk is--it is basically a motor bike w/a covered seating area that is still open to the elements--picture above).

Once we finally escaped we climbed to the top of the Golden Mount and had some great views of the city.

Tonight we went to a local place near where we live for dinner, when we sat down, we realized that neither one of us remembered the phrase book & no one spoke english. They handed us a menu where the first page said "Welcome", and that was the last English that we saw. We ended up ordering by pointing at things, and it was a miracle that we got something close to what we ordered for the main course. Other things, we just gave up on.