Dax and Liz in Asia: Asia, Farewell, Part 1

This is our last night in Asia. I haven't blogged really since we hit Bangkok four days ago. I couldn't resist the Hangover Part II reference, so I hope you enjoyed that.

Bangkok was sufficiently crazy for our standards. The term "urban jungle" is a fitting one for the side of Bangkok we experienced. We did a lot of single-file walking down sidewalks that were two narrow to fit two people side-by-side. There aren't really any pedestrian walk signs here either, so we often had to just start decisively walking into intersections and hope for the best.

We went to a night market in Bangkok that spanned many blocks. Thankfully, Dax was able to refrained from purchasing this super powerful blue laser he saw there. The sales person held it up to a cloth and burned a hole in it straight away. Then he lit a match with it in seconds. I sorta freaked out about the prospect of loosing an eye if Dax became a proud owner, so I'm really glad he settled for just having held one in his hands for a little while. Thanks honey.

Bangkok has a huge river running through it and part of the public transit system is a ferry boat that takes you up and down the river. We took the ferry to the Grand Palace and had a look at the Emerald Buddha. We also got to see some white-clad soldiers guarding the royal residency in the same compound as the Buddha. I think it was a historical residency, not the home of the current king, but it was nice checking out the huge compound with a mixture of grand western and eastern style architecture.

After the touristy stuff, we got on the next boat we could find, and got off rather randomly at a stop across the river in search of some food. What we found was another huge market, this time filled almost exclusively with Thai people. The other noteworthy aspect of this market was that there was one long street that was completely lined with street-food carts, one after another for what seemed like a good kilometer or so. The problem was that none, I mean NONE of the food looked appetizing in the least. Either it was completely unidentifiable, like the off-white balls on sticks (fish balls?), or it was somewhat familiar, like fried chicken, but so greasy-looking or, how should I put this... made out of parts of a chicken that generally don't even make it into American restaurants. So we'd just been walking for hours and were tired and hungry, surrounded by tons of food-like substance, without an edible-looking morsel in site. We finally rounded a couple corners and found a place called Bangkok Grill that served western food. Somehow, they served me up a $3 hamburger and Dax a $2 shnitzle with excellent flavor and digestibility and our lives were saved. I would have settled for most anything at that point but somehow the western food came to us and it was great.

Since traffic is so bad in Bangkok, it served us well to hop back on a ferry, take it down to a pier as close to the MRT (subway system) as possible, tuk-tuk to the MRT stop, then ride the subway all the way back to our hotel. This was a long, but rewarding journey, and overall a good day.

Stay tuned for more Bangkok and some good ol' fashion Hong Kong (part 2) - in our next installment, coming soon.