This is Crystal Palace

I had a whirlwind adventure this past Saturday. I will try to break the posts up into three to discuss the three places I went.

First up: the royal palace!....of TY-LAND! (Bangkok is the capitol, you know)

If you've never seen TY money, here is what it looks like (you need this to get inside the palace):

And here are some pictures of the palace:










Couple things worth noting here. First off, it was easily over 90 degrees F in TY-land on this day...same as every day....and of course the pounding sun was in no short supply.

They won't let you into the palace unless you have long pants on. Seriously. If you have shorts they force you to wear these ridiculous pajama looking things.

That's why the picture of me standing next to the royal guard (guy in white) has me looking about ready to pass out and sweating quite profusely.


Lots of gold in this palace...and elephants. I REALLY wanted to take that one smaller elephant home with me...but it takes 4 men to lift it. Not going fit in the overhead.


And I will end each post with a fancy-pants TY-land bus:

The Denny's of Thailand

Sorry I've been lazy,

Ok, first up is the place I was out to lunch at my first day here. It's called "MK". Someone referred to it as the Denny's of Thailand...must be an American.


So you go in the place and sit down and they bring out boiling pots of water that are placed on heaters built right into the table top (not sure if they're induction or what, but seems like the risk of burning hands is high). Then they bring out plates with food that is then placed into the boiling water and served family style. They also have different things you can order on the side like meats, noodles, etc. For drink I had what was essentially a blended watermelon. And for desert they have ice cream with a bunch of weird stuff in it (rice, beans, corn, etc.). I think it's just for the texture because it all tastes like ice cream. Really good actually.

And you get a small bowl of red sauce that is like Sriracha but about half as hot. Then they give you chiles and minced garlic that you can add to it to taste. I was ready to start drinking this stuff.

I could probably eat myself to death in a place like that.


I want to dedicate the second part of this post to the buses of Thailand. My...oh my. I've defined three criteria that determine the rating of a bus in Thailand:
1) Height - the taller your bus is, the better it is. I've seen multiple buses that have to be approaching 20 feet tall. I'm not even kidding you. When you see these things...it's like "wait a second...there was a design engineering group somewhere in the world that decided it would be a good idea to manufacture something like this?" It seriously looks like it's about to tip over every time it changes lanes. It's ridiculous. I don't have a picture of this one, but I think it's this: http://www.scania.com/products-services/buses-coaches/intercity-coach/irizarpb/

2) brightly colored paint job featuring as many anime characters as will fit on the side of the bus. Picture is worth a 1000 words, and this is a mild paint job compared to some I've seen:


3) lights, again I wish I had a picture of this because the one above does not do justice to some of the buses I've seen...they've seriously got like 30-50 lights on the front. They must consider it a good bus when it can blind people 50 meters away.

Viewpoint

I wasn't going to do an update yet, but I couldn't resist. Check out this view from the 16th floor patio:






This is basically just a 180 degree sweep...this same view roughly is on the other side as well. Someone decided that downtown Bangkok should have as many buildings as possible.


The plane ride was not brutal, but I wouldn't do it for fun. Mostly just long. My plan had been to stay up the entire trip and then fall blissful into sleep upon arriving at the hotel. Nope. I fell asleep on both plane trips and only slept from 2am - 6am. Hopefully better sleep tonight.