Easter trip

So I have some less interesting blog posts waiting to be written- not boring, but I just haven’t been motivated to write about them.  After weeks now of saying I’d get to it, I decided to skip those for something new that is very interesting to me.

 

Alex got a week off of school for a combined Easter and Tomb Sweeping holiday. Since we didn’t get to travel as much as everyone else during the long break, Mark and I decided that we should go traveling for that week.  We talked about Paris (I’ve always wanted to go) but we thought more expensive, jet lag, and it’s only for 7 days.  So I shelved that idea for another time. The next place that we could all agree on was Thailand.   Thailand was a place that sold me on moving to China because it would be close enough to visit for cheap and I’ve always wanted to go. And Mark wanted to go because of food. And Alex didn’t get a whole lot of say, but he was happy when he heard about what we’d be doing.

And so, I present….. our trip to Bangkok! This may have to be a 3 part post, to get in half the pictures I took 🙂

We got to Bangkok at 2 am, and didn’t get to our hotel until about 4:30 am.  We had planned that the first day was going to be lounging in the pool and just finding good food to eat.  When we got up, we discovered that the pool was being repaired and not in use the whole trip.  Unfortunately this was a big deal because Alex was so looking forward to swimming.

We walked about a quarter of a mile from our hotel and hit a food court.

After that, we did what every family does on vacation, we got the guys haircuts.  We found a spot and just decided to go for it.

 

Both of them looked so good, and Alex agreed that it was much cooler with all that hair gone.

After haircuts, we just wandered around looking for the street food we had been told about.  What we did find was a bingsu place. If you haven’t heard of bingsu, you should try to find it, it’s worth a try.   It’s a mountain of frozen milk shaved into tiny flakes and then covered with condensed milk and toppings.

After being denied the pool, we had to figure out what we were going to do next.  We decided to go to a famous market that Mark had seen on Food Ranger.  It was closing pretty much right as we got there. Luckily across the street there was another big market to try out.

We thought we were at the famous Chatachuk Market, but instead we were at a much smaller one. Alex found some snacks that he liked and we met a nice couple who explained to us that we were not in Chatachuk but it closed at 6 so why don’t we head to JJ Green’s market instead. It’s a night market, but not one that was on any of my lists.

We were all getting hungry so we decided to find some things to eat, but didn’t want to settle on the first thing.  We ended up finding Alex a grilled cheese, if you’ve met us in real life, you know that grilled cheese is one of his favorites and hard to recreate here in China.  And Mark found cheese fries to go along with it.

After that we went back to a grill it yourself place that I had wanted to try.  The nice thing about Bangkok, is that while it was pretty hot while we were there, you don’t need the air conditioning to cool down, a fan blowing your way is usually enough.  The grill spot had fans blowing everywhere which made sitting at a table with a grill not too bad.

I enjoyed it, we burnt the toast to complete blackness though, we weren’t sure what we were supposed to do with it.

After that we walked around some more and found a stand that served desert waffles, so Alex got a chocolate chip waffle with chocolate sauce on it. because it was starting to get crowded there, I didn’t take any more pictures, we just focused on not letting him bump the chocolate waffle into people passing by.

It was a great accidental experience that we wouldn’t have gotten to have if I had been confused by the map on my phone.

This was only just the end of day 1!

Day 2 started with a relatively simple plan, let’s go to Wat Pho and see the temple of the reclining Buddha. This time we decided to be adventurous and take the metro. I know a lot of people like the skytrain and Metro in Bangkok, and it’s not bad, but I’ve been spoiled by the Shanghai metro now. I will say though the wait to get onto the metro in Bangkok was much more civilized, everyone wait in lines, no pushing or shoving.  so a transfer or two later, we ended up at the boat pier to take a boat to the temple.

When we got to the temple, we had a big discussion about being respectful (no climbing on things, shoes off when needed, why I had to cover my shoulders- not having Buddha as a tattoo) and set off for exploring.

Not to spoil the surprise, but the pictures will give it away…. we were at the wrong temple.  We went to Wat Arun, which is the temple of the Dawn and amazing. It was a great mistake because going to that one hadn’t been on my list.

 

This is 1/2 way through day two, but the end of this post. I think I subjected you to enough photos for now.