What’s the capital of Thailand? If you instinctively jumped to protect your crotch, congratulations – you’ve been to middle school. It took us 12 hours on a van and a bus to get to Bangkok. And it was terrifying. The bus constantly felt like it was going downhill out of control, even though we were driving flat land at 60 km/h. It constantly smelled like someone had turned the bathroom inside out, and the smelly ass australians in front of us had smelly asses the whole ride. That’s another thing, Australians are fucking everywhere. You don’t even have to travel – they travel so much they’re probably in your town right now wearing ugly ass parachute pants and tank tops, bearded, coiffed and tattooed from neck to ankle. Bangkok is nothing like what I was expecting. It’s massive and very heavily urbanized. Sure, it’s the major city but it was still surprising to find it so clean and westernized. It was a far cry from the other cities we had come through – they were clearly resort towns and everything in between was far more rural than this concrete and steel playground. There was a lot of stuff we were looking forward to doing and having done to us in Bangkok, and also some stuff we were dreading but knew we would have to put up with at some point (more on that later). Unfortunately, some things got cut short due to the protests. Despite the current travel advisories, the protests posed no danger to us whatsoever. The real shutdown wasn’t planned till the day after we left, so we weren’t even there for the worst of it (which I suppose would be when grenades started going off). We went to a lot of temples and a boner shrine, which is exactly what it sounds like and looks to be in the galleries. But yeah, temples are everywhere in this city, we even hit a couple that weren’t on our list just because we happened to be walking by. They are large and peaceful, although I don’t get how the monks can meditate or whatever it is they do besides not bang with mosquitoes dying to cover you from head to toe. Some of the idols here are iconic, like the Golden Buddha (kind of an unclear name since they’re all gilded) and the Reclining Buddha, which lies there on its side, elbow bent propping up its head as if to say “draw me like one of your french girls.” Also we got ripped off at a ping pong show. Only kidding. We paid exactly the agreed-upon price, instead of the 4000 baht they were trying to extort from us. We were forcefully ejected as one would expect.
Shefali and Vijay
[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/97388931@N08/sets/72157640001741926/