Bangkok, May 15th – 19th, 2019

Sorry for such a long wait from the last post! Life has been slowing down here as we fall into a daily routine. I had been waiting for something really exciting to happen so that I could post about it, and recently it was necessary for us to go to Bangkok (the capitol of Thailand), since our tourist visas needed to be sorted out. So here are the main highlights of our trip!

Wednesday – May 15th:

Early in the morning we left for the Pakse airport, and caught our flight to Bangkok. After our 2-hour flight we arrived in the Bangkok airport. I think I experienced some culture shock when we first landed because everything was suddenly so big and modern. It was like being on a different planet compared to the rural little village of Laongam.

We soon discovered that the sky train is probably the most important form of transportation in Bangkok, looking at how many people were using it to get around. It was a little difficult figuring out the whole train system, but luckily we managed to get to our hotel!

Thursday – May 16th:

We had a nice sleep at our hotel, and woke up early in the morning. We had breakfast and then we had to go to the train station to get our tickets for our return trip sorted out. After that we caught a Touk-touk to the Royal Thai Palace, and walked around it. It was really big and really fancy, and everything was covered in golden ribbons from the Thai King’s recent coronation.

Near the palace was a temple called Vat Pho (It sounds a bit like Vat Phu!), Mom and I decided to go in and it was absolutely beautiful! We got to see the giant golden “reclining Buddha” and the rest of the temple as well. It was cool to see the differences from a Thai temple to the temples back in Laos.

Because the temple and palace were right near the river, we thought taking a little boat ride would be a nice way to cap off the day. We found some people down near one of the docks and we got our own little private boat (someone else was steering of course). The boat driver took us down one of the canals in a little loop, and we got some pictures of the wildlife, including some beautiful Egrets and giant “Water Monitor Lizards”!

The boat driver dropped us off near China town, so we walked down the street a little bit, just to look at it. We then took a Touk-Touk back to our hotel.

Friday – May 17th:

Today we mostly explored Bangkok, and checked out one of its many giant shopping malls. In the mall, we found a bookstore that had a lot of English books in it, so I was able to get a couple novels. In the evening we found a little park that was putting on a Thai production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, a play that I did a couple years ago. It was all in Thai, but we could understand a little bit since Lao and Thai language are very similar, and we knew the main story line. The setting was beautiful (it was held outside) and the acting was also really enjoyable! Who would of thought I would be seeing a Shakespeare play while in Thailand?

Saturday – May 18th:

On Saturday we went to a mall called Terminal 21. The really cool part about this mall is that every floor is fashioned after a city in a different country, with cuisine, clothing, brands, and decoration found in that country. The first floor was Paris, France so there was a lot of pastries there. The second was Tokyo, Japan, with a lot of Japanese brands and Japanese food. Then we went up to Istanbul, Turkey and then to London, England. And finally up to San Fransisco, where there was a model of the golden gate bridge.

At the very top of the mall there was a movie theatre, so Mom and I decided to go see a movie for our last day in Bangkok. We saw the new live action Pokemon movie, which was really cute and had very good CGI animation.

We then had to quickly eat dinner and catch the sky train to the actual train station, for our night train out of Bangkok. We managed to get there on time and the train started off towards the Lao-Thai border.

Sunday – May 19th:

On Sunday morning I woke up after a fairly nice sleep on the train. We soon got to the Thai-Lao border, and were picked up by Ou-Ee who works at Cuso. We then flew back to Pakse and drove back to Laongam. It was a long day!

Overall Mom and I really enjoyed our trip in Bangkok, we both missed Laos though, and are glad to be back.

*Word(s) of the Day: I have decided to give you a couple words in Thai, since the whole post is about Thailand!

• Mai (Pronounced: My), it means ‘no’ in Thai.
• Sai (Pronounced how it looks), it means ‘yes’ in Thai.