Thailand #2

Day 1: The hotel helped Katie and I hire a taxi driver for the day. We went to a museum, the world's largest crocodile farm, and the ancient city of Siam. The museum was beautiful. It's more of a temple than a museum, and its dedicated to the 4 major religions. On top of the building is a 3-headed elephant, and you can walk all the way up there.

 Grand entrance

The crocodile farm was enormous. I believe them when they say they're the world's largest. I don't know how many crocodiles they have, but I would want to be far far away if something went wrong and all those animals got out. I heard crocodiles hiss for the first time - that was crazy. It's not a very scary sound but it sounds terrifying when it's coming out of an enormous lizard. They had a crocodile show and we also saw an elephant show.

This elephant painted a picture of flowers. After the show the elephants came into the audience to collect money with their trunks and put it in the trainer's pocket. It was amazing!

The ancient city was really cool. Most of the stuff they had was replicas of the originals. There wasn't a lot of English so Katie and I kind of had to figure things out/make them up on our own, but it wasn't too hard. There was a shuttle that would occasionally pick us up/drop us off so we didn't have to walk the entire way. They had about 100 things to see, so it's good we got to ride some of the time.

Day 2: We set up a tour through the hotel to see the Royal Grand Palace. The king and his family used to live there, but now they have another mansion somewhere else. There's also a temple inside the palace.

We had to wear long pants and cover our shoulders, which was unfortunate because it was hot. But that's how women have to dress when there might be a monk around. Bummer. We got to the palace early and had to wait. They let Thai people in earlier than foreigners, and Thai people don't have to pay either. It was nice to have a guide tell us all about this place. It was gorgeous. Garrett and Kyla arrived in the evening, and the 4 of us went to Chinatown to celebrate the new year. There were so many people! We waited for a parade to start for about 2 hours, and it turned out to be a 75 year old princess, and about 25 cars following her. Definitely not worth the wait.

Day 3: Elephant and floating market day. We had to leave the hotel at 6:15. We stopped at a few other places to pick up more people, then got transferred to a new van, then drove about 2 hours to get to our destination. First we rode elephants. We walked up onto a platform so we were at the same height as the elephant, then just climbed on. There was a box on top of the animal that we sat in, and we had to wear seat belts. I found this funny because we didn't even wear seat belts in cars. 2 people shared one elephant. The elephant's skin was really thick and rough, and it had coarse hair. But at the same time it was kind of soft. We had a driver, but he spent a lot of time on the ground taking pictures of us. It was a really bumpy ride. I loved it!

 Bringing a little Korea to Thailand :)

Then we went to a floating market, which is exactly what it sounds like. People sit in boats and sell stuff, and you can get in a boat to go buy stuff or you can stand on the shore and yell at them. They were charging to go in a boat, so we stayed on shore and yelled. They'll pass you a bucket on a stick to put your money in, then they put whatever you're buying back in the bucket and pass it to you. So simple, so brilliant. We also got to take a boat ride around what was basically a floating neighborhood, and see how some people still live.

 Spring rolls

Congratulations on making it to the end of this blog! I'll write about the rest of the trip tomorrow.