Sunburnt in Bangkok

Welcome to our home country of Thailand. We have a few simple rules we'd like you to follow during your stay:

• Don't speak poorly of the president or the ruling party. Don't mock the imagery of him that we've hung on every lamppost - if it helps, just avoid looking at the lampposts altogether.
• Don't point the soles of your feet at people, or at images of the Buddha.
• Bow out of respect with your hands in prayer at your neck. Bow win entering and leaving. On second thought, just keep bowing - especially when you're not sure whether or not to bow.

We followed these rules in an effort to appear respectful, and we think it worked quite well for us.

Bangkok is a zoo. To expand this metaphor: zoos are smelly, crowded, somewhat flashy, and of course, packed with more sights than you can see in a single day. Zoos also have cheap unnecessarily expensive food, and zoos have people leaning against lampposts lying to you that an exhibit "doesn't open until 2 PM" and offering to drive you somehwere else in a three-wheeled open-air taxi and charge you a handful of dough for his services. Well, zoos don't really have that last part, but Bangkok sure does. Even if we hadn't read about that scam beforehand, we'd have known better.

The grand palace and "wats" (temples) we visitedin Bangkok were gold-tiled and quite garish. Inside the Wat Phra Kaeo (the holiest Thai temple) sits the Emerald Buddha. Well, it's technically Jade, but the monk who unearthed it mistook it for a more precious stone - thus, the moniker. They change the Buddha's clothes thrice a year to comply with the seasons. It was still dressed for the wet season, so the statue wore a golden gown. I think it was inconsiderate of them not to throw in a wee little golden umbrella. I suppose it's hard to pray to a dude holding an umbrella, though. O' the plight of the Buddha!

The hilight of our morning was our authentic Thai herbal massages - an hour of pressure-point full-body massage with some scattered rub-downs with hot, menthol-soaked rags. Ours for only $16 apiece!

We had some beers with an Australian chiropractor and another American traveler. Chiang Mai and its neighboring village "Pie" (sp?) in Northern Thailand came very highly reocommended. We may have to alter our itinerary accordingly once we return to Thailand in two weeks.

We spent an hour at an off-the-map temple/graveyard, where a man sold us a plate of banana segments and two long sticks ($.10 total) and we fed dozens of turtles in the temple's ponds! We did this until our bananas ran out; it was more fun than we'd like to admit.

After walking the markets and climbing the Golden Mount to get a high-altitude view of the sprawling city. We didn't appreciate the city any further, but it did satisfy our innate urge to climb things. We actually discovered that we had these innate urges as we made the climb. The delights of self-discovery! Ahem.

We hit the hay early that night after a Bangkok canal ride and a dirt-cheap five-course Thai dinner. Let's go to Cambodia.