Mr. Mahdad comes to Bangkok

This weekend our friend and co-worker came to visit. Our friend Samir is on assignment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a few weeks, and we convinced him that Bangkok is an amazing city to visit and that he should come out for the weekend. So Friday night Samir arrived. We wanted to show Samir a little of Bangkok. So we spent Saturday at the Grand Palace completely in awe of the amazing temples and buildings. We also were able to see the Emerald Buddha. Here is our album with pictures from the past two weekends.

Bangkok - Weekends with Friends

We also took Samir, Anju and Sriram to the IT Mall to do some bargain hunting. All in all, I think our friends from home enjoyed their time in Bangkok, and they definitely helped soothe my homesickness.

Dinner with models

So in Bangkok, there is the traditional life of the local Thai people, and then the lives of the expat and foreign residents of the city. Tonight Alby and I decided to see what life for the expat community is like. So we made dinner reservations at the Bedsupper Club. But these reservations were not for any normal night, Alby booked us for 'Model Night'. We aren't really sure what 'Model Night' means but by the time we finished dinner we noticed that most of the restaurant was filled with tall blond women. Probably the only time we had seen so many non-Thais in a single place in a long time.

The restaurant was cool, everyone is seated on a part of a very long bed. We ate dinner on little trays. The food was pretty good, and it was fun to just go out and see a different side of the Bangkok night scene.

Faces from home

Our friends Anju and Sriram have been are in Thailand for the coming week traveling all over. I guess you can see we inspired them to come out. When Anju heard we were going to be working in Thailand she decided it was time for her to fulfill her wish to come to visit Thailand, so the planned a trip and flew right over! We were so happy to see our friends from home here in Bangkok. They arrived late last night, and started site seeing early in the morning. We finally caught up with them for dinner in the evening. Here we are enjoying dinner at the Siam Paragon.

Eye of the Tiger

Instead of hopping onto a plane on Friday, Alby and I decided to ground ourselves and explore more of Bangkok. A co-worker had planned a day trip for Saturday and invited us to join him. So we woke up bright and early on Saturday morning to start our journey at 6:30am. Our first stop was the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market. Its about 2-2.5 hours of a drive out of Bangkok to get to the floating market, and the market pretty much is closed by 10am, so we had to leave early to get some time to shop and explore.

The floating market is just a unique experience. When we arrived, our guide hired us a boat to take us through the market itself. There are stores that are not along the canals, but that would be just like any regular market in Thailand. The canals were a Thai version of the canals in Venice..we were definitely not in Venice, but it was a interesting comparision. Our boat guide pretty much controled which shops we stopped at, and how long we were stuck at a store, you could tell there was some type of arrangement between the shopowners and the boat guides, because the places where were were not happy with the price but the shop keeper was trying to bargin, we would ask the driver to move on, but she would not budge, other times she would quickly move on. Barginning here was a must, but sometimes the shopowners would get upset if we undercut too much. Our coworker got scolded pretty bad by one shop owner because we think he stumbled upon the break even price for the store owner, and she was not happy that he wanted her to basically not make any money. The market no longer sells goods for the locals, its a tourist place, so you mostly get soveniers and handicrafts. Along the canals you could still buy fresh fruit and even stop for a bowl of hot noodle soup :) With our boat loaded with good shopping and "junk" shopping, we headed back to the loading area to continue our day trip.

By this point it was about 10:30am, our next stop would be Tiger Temple. Tiger Temple is a monestery in the northwest-ish part of Thailand (near the mountains that boarder with Burma). The temple is called Tiger Temple because the monks here have been rescuing and raising the local tigers. The tigers now live in the monestery, many roaming free with the monks. Our guide wanted to get us to the temple before 1pm, so that we could play with the baby tigers, since at 1, the young tigers are put away to rest, and the adult tigers are moved to a Canyon area that is cooler, and people can take pictures with them. The little baby tigers were super cute. They played with each other and the crew at the temple just like little kittens would. We got a few good pictures, and even one with us walking with the tiger as he moved to the cooler canyon.

After Tiger Temple, we drove down to the city Kanchanaburi located on the River Kwai where we had lunch at a local place overlooking the river. Lunch was interesting to say the least...don't think we are really into the local thai dishes. The River Kwai area is famous for the Bridge over the River Kwai, the start of the infamous World War II Death Railway to Burma (Myanmar).

All is safe and sound....

Hi, Just wanted to post a quick message. Alby and I are safe and sound. We just returned back from a weekend in Hanoi, Vietnam to hear that there was a airplane crash in Phuket. Since we've been active travelers we just wanted our friends and family to know we are safe.

Good morning Viet-NAM!

Now we can always say "..back when I was in NAM...". Ok seriously, the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel was crazy. The guy was definitely Vietnamese, but drove like a crazy driver from India. He would not only honk, but high beam everybody in his way! The roads were busy, and we witnessed 3 accidents along the way. The craziest was when he pulled into a toll booth, and just honked his horn some more, and without paying, someone lifted the barricade, and we were through! I want that kind of service in the US!

Luckily we got onto the tour to Ha Long Bay the next morning, which is a 3 hr drive from Hanoi, but it was completely worth it. The countryside is REALLY pretty--lots of lush, lush green fields and relaxed weather that just makes you feel so much at ease. At Ha Long Bay, I've never seen so many classic wooden boats in my life! They were all docked closely together, some with the bamboo sails that you see in the movies. Ha Long means "descended dragon", which is the symbolic name for the bay because it really does look like a dragon landed and had a bunch of kids. The steep limestone mountains around the still water is amazing.

That night we went to "Com Viet", a fancy restaurant that has a picture of Hillary Clinton visiting. We had a shrimp cooked in a coconut, and by the way, the coconuts in Vietnam weren't too appealing to us. We then rumaged through the night market and compulsively haggled over various lacquerware and checked out the very green Ho Kiem Lake. Apparently it's a romantic lake with a good number of people sitting around, but it was so dim and no stars were out I wasn't quite sure what to think. We missed the water puppet show which is supposed to be a must see eventhough it sounds like it's for kids but oh well. For breakfast and lunch the next day we had PHO! REAL, Genuine Pho! It was pretty good--fresh, light noodles in a tasy broth. We had to try it again elsewhere for lunch even. We spent the rest of that morning shopping...you won't believe that there are stores that will make your tombstone right then and there. It's like right next to the gold jewelrey store is a tombstone shop that will put just about anything you wanted. Had some fun negotiating too. After spending 20 minutes with the merchant and pulling out specific colors of scarves, Sharon ran out the front door because the merchant wouldn't go any lower! Then they went even lower than what we wanted, but we didn't have enough cash. Poor lady...but we hit the ATM and came back. Really pretty city and lots of shopping to do!

Click here to see all of our pictures from Hanoi.

A Regular week in Bangkok

I guess this was as close to a normal week in Bangkok as we could get. Work has been pretty busy, so our hours have been a little more consumed, and we are pretty tired by the time we get home. :(

My cousins from India, Shvetal, Sonika, and their new baby girl Tanisha, were here this week on vacation. It was great, they were trying to figure out where to go for their time off, and remembered that we were in Bangkok, so they decided to come and visit. They spent a few days in Phuket and arrived in Bangkok on Tuesday. It was so nice to see family and to finally meet our new family member. We had a great time exploring a little of Bangkok with them.

We went to the other night market in town, Patpong Market. It's amazing how people create knock offs of everything! Needless to say, I think Alby and I are marketed out....I think we've finally gotten over the touristy feeling.

Friday night our co-worker took us out to Chinatown to eat dinner at one of his favorite restaurants. Even the Prince of Thailand comes there for dinner. It was definitely a place we would not have gone in on our own since it seemed like a step up from a hole in the wall, but the food was amazing, you could tell this was a place locals came to often.


Sunday we tried to do more of the sights and went to Wat Pho, where the ginormous (it is a word) Reclinging Buddha is located. I remember the first thing I said when I walked in was WOW! because it was that amazing. Our pictures do not do it justice.

Friends are the chocolate chips in the cookie of life....

Don't get me wrong, I love traveling with Alby, and getting to see all of Asia with him, but it was super nice to spend the weekend with our good friends from home, Pami and Neel. Pami and Neel had already arrived into Koh Samui a day before us and picked out a great boutique hotel for us all to stay at. Alby and I flew in after work on Friday night. Koh Samui is a great beach town. We were able to walk down from our hotel and have dinner out on the beach. We didn't do much in Koh Samui other than sit on the beach and relax (something we much needed after the crazy work week). Relaxing with good company made it all that much better. The water in Koh Samui was great....nice and warm. You could just stay in the water all day, Neel almost floated out to sea :) We had some almost real Mexican food and lots of crab fried rice :) It was sad to see the weekend end :( and say bye to Pami and Neel.