A Tourist's Day in Bangkok

So last night our friend Neel flew in for a few hours as he transfered from his flight from home to go to Laos to meet Pami. It was a brief vist (8 hours) but it was nice to see a friend away from home :) We'll be meeting up with Pami and Neel later on during their trip in Laos and Thailand, we can't wait!!

After we had breakfast with Neel, Alby and I headed out for a day as a tourist in Bangkok. We started with going to see the Golden Buddha in Chinatown. When we arrived there we see this beautiful temple and walk inside and see a huge gold Buddha, so we take pictures and take in the peacefulness of the temple. When we left the temple we saw people paying for tickets and climbing up some stairs. We then realized that this was not the actualy Golden Buddha, but another one that was placed in a more accessible location. So we paid our tickets and climbed up to see the real Golden Buddha. It was amazing. I could not believe it was solid gold!

By that time it was close to lunch, so we decided we'd grab some lunch in chinatown before we headed to our second destination. We walked into a clean looking chinese dim sum place. The restaurant was packed, and we took that as a good sign. When we finally fought ourselves to a table we noticed that everyone seemed to be ordering lots of dimsum plates. All the tables had towers of the dim sum bamboo baskets on their table (another good sign). When we got our menu, we saw all the dim sum plates were only 15 bahts (that's less than 50 cents), no wonder they ordered a lot! Since we weren't starving we ordered ourselves 5 plates and figured we'd have more than enough food. When the dim sum arrived we finally understood why everyone ordered so much. The dim sum was super tiny. Anyhow... we ended up ordering more food :)


From Chinatown we went to the famous Weekend Market (off the Mo Chit Station on BTS). This was like the biggest flea market in the world. Over 34 acres of shops! I don't think we saw more than 1 acre if even that much. They had everything you could imagine there. Shops for clothes, dishes, shoes, bags, food, etc. Anything you could want was there and cheap! Since we had reserved a sunset dinner cruise for later in the day we didn't have long to shop, we'll definitely try to make another trip back here when we have more time.

In the evening we took a sunset dinner cruise up the Chao Phraya River. The pictures speak for themselves. The cruise is a great way to see the beauty of the Bangkok Temples and the Golden Palace both in the day and at sunset! Here are all the pictures!