Thursday Sept 13 2007

Hi! first of all, we felt no shudders from the earthquake last night. much to jamie's sadness! i prefer to not wish for more earthquakes, as we are headed off to the beach tomorrow. but jamie cannot help but wish for some earthly natural disaster excitement! ;)

we are having a great time. it gets really hot and humid and we get tired, but thankfully our delightful hotel has a rooftop pool which we can escape to when we are hot and tired. check it out at www.buddylodge.com

the food so far is great. we have had a couple of super hot dishes, a green curry yesterday which i loved, but jamie didn't. he doesn't like the too hot food. then of course some pad thai and some eggrolls from a street vendor. also i was much delighted today to find some mangosteens at a market, my favorite fruit ever in the world. our hotel has free breakfast bar with both scrambled eggs (a little watery for my taste) and bacon to thai food. i had a chicken curry this morning that was delightful. yesterday they had some rolls that looked like they should have fruit inside, but there was and odd piece of a spam-like meat strip inside. i had the samosa thing instead. the coffee here is fabulous, very strong. also i have been taste testing the fruit juice boxes. this morning i had a kiwi grape apple combo which was lovely.

we have seen several very large golden buddas. lovely! amazing! the temples are cool, of course it is a delight to hear the monks chanting in the background. i like seeing the young monks walking around in their little orange outfits. so sweet. we also saw the emerald budda today, which was only discovered in the 1970's. apparently, they had covered it up in a tar like substance some years ago to keep it from being plundered. then a monk saw some of the black stuff chipping off, and he discovered the "emerald" budda underneath. it is really chinese jade, but the monk mistakenly thought it was emerald, hence the name.

we took a long-tail boat ride yesterday as well, through many back water streets of bangkok. this was very cool to see all the little houses on stilts. some very very nice and mansion like, others were falling into the water! we were on this huge boat all ourselves, and the engines was very loud with a very extra long rudder. interesting. jamie was afraid of getting sea sick but no such thing happened. some of the water was very rocky though!

on the street where we are staying there are many vendors and street sellers. the sticker guy had a very interesting sticker which proclaimed "Long live Bin Laden!" and had his picture. we were really surprised. then on the news we saw that in pakistan, bin Laden has a higher approval rating than Musaref. i frankly had no idea about this. apparently the news in america does not reveal all. maybe in this case that is a good thing or GW might have all the support he needs to stick his nose into Pakistan even more!

we have driven around town in the tuk-tuks and had fun looking at how everything operates here. as jamie put it, "there ain't no home depot here!" the wood is sold out of tiny shops on the side of the road. we also saw some guy hand carving theses kick ass doors.

today we finally made it to the royal palace. holy shit, it was amazing. the artfulness, the mirror work, the handmade chinese tiles were all over the top. i have never seen anything so crazy beautiful! we walked around taking pictures of everything, just like good tourists! wow! so colorful and so thai, like with the dragons and the scary faces on the guys and stuff.

we DID fall for the standard con, and we were a little ashamed of ourselves, but we also saw why it is easy to fall for these scams! you will be o your way somewhere and a guy will come up to you. he says, oh no, today is a special holiday and the palace is closed. plus, you can't go there wearing that! you have to have a long skirt and pants and those sleeves are NOT long enough! so of course we believe him. and he has an official tourist badge on, saying he is a government rep. (we conveniently forgot they can make any kind of fake document you want right out in front of our hotel! including driver's licenses!) so he suggests a different buddha to go see. he tells us it is the WHITE license plates that we should trust, not the YELLOW that the guy yesterday told us to trust. then he sends us on our way in a tuk tuk to go see the buddha. we see the buddha, start getting a funny feeling about the whole deal, and suddenly realize, we are on our way to a shop where the driver and the tourist guy will both get a cut of anything we buy. so we tell him no, take us back, take us back. he balked, so i said we were sick in the stomach. we learned a BIG lesson. don't trust anyone. ha! we laughed at ourselves for falling for this! but we did get to see some of the city and we saw some cool buddhas, too. and we still even made it to the palace, where they have clothes for you to wear if you are not wearing the right thing. and it is open EVERYDAY no matter what.

LIARS!

the exhaust in the city is overwhelming and gross. we are looking forward to going to the beach for some quiet and some clean air. the beach we are going to is called koh chang. it is an island on the gulf of thailand. we have a beach side hut reserved for us, and it seems incredibly nice! we will be staying on the northeast side of the island at 1st, but we have to go see the sunset on the west over the ocean so we will be moving around a little.

love to all, write us please,
jo and jamie