August 06, 2007

Thailand: Part One - Bangkok and My 31st Birthday

After an incredible couple of days in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, it was ready for us to head to Thailand for another three and a half weeks of vacation!

After hours and hours of delays, our plane finally left Dubai around 6:30am just as the sun was coming up!

Check out the view of city!

Flying out over the Persian Gulf.

Delicious Indian veggie breakfast.

A scant six hours later, and we were approaching Bangkok!

Check out the crazy rectangular farm plots around the outskirts of the city.

me, meredith — Sooooo excited!

About to land.

We didn't have any luggage checked, so as soon as we got off the plane, we hailed a taxi and asked to be taken right to Khao San Road - which is pretty much the jumping off point for all backpackers looking for cheap accommodations.

meredith — No seat belts! Welcome to Thailand, you over-concerned for your safety American!

We arrived at Khao San Road, seen here in all its totally overdone commercial glory, around 2:30pm. We checked into the D&D Inn...

meredith — ...and immediately went to bed! We'd hardly gotten any sleep the night before and figured a nice long nap might help get our bodies adjusted to local time.

We woke up a little after 10pm and headed downstairs to get some dinner. One of the best parts about Thailand is that you get to eat Thai food for every meal. (Compared to home where only about 65% of my meals are Thai food).

The D&D Inn's outdoor restaurant is surrounded by ponds and little stone paths. When we were leaving, we spotted these two frogs.

After dinner, we went back upstairs and read and relaxed for a while, and then around midnight we headed back out to grab a nightcap and check out the night life. (Almost an exact reenactment of my first night in Bangkok when I came to Thailand alone back in 2005!)

me, meredith — Except that this time it wasn't Thai New Years so there weren't mobs of people crowding the streets and throwing buckets of water on us.

After a drink or two, we were feeling a bit sleepy and decided to hit bed so that we'd be on local time the next day. Before turning in, we stopped at a store and picked up some schnacks. Mmmm....Beng Beng!

Tuesday, August 7th

meredith — When we'd first checked in, they didn't have any rooms available that had windows! So the first thing we did when we woke up on Tuesday was head down to the front desk and get our room switched. Here's Meredith relaxing in the sunshine of our new room!

Hi, do you think we brought enough books?

After getting unpacked and settled into our new room, we headed upstairs to enjoy the D&D Inn's rooftop pool!

meredith — It didn't even matter that it was overcast, after the Emirates it felt like a treat to be able to be outside without the sun cooking your bean!

After we'd taken a dip and snoozed in the (lack of) sun for a bit, we decided to get Thai massages! If you're looking to totally relax and chill the fuck out without spending a ton of money, you really can't do much better than Thailand.

Around noon, we finally decided to motivate and headed out to do some sight seeing. After all of our lazing around, we needed to pick me up, so we scored two bottles of Krating Daeng, the original Thai drink that inspired Red Bull. Don't let the tiny bottles fool you, each one packs 800mg of taurine and 50mg of caffeine.

Then we found a tuk-tuk driver who was willing to take us around for a couple of hours to a few places we wanted to go sightseeing.

me, meredith — Here we are showing off our brand new Thai sunglasses that we purchased with our Red Bulls for a whopping grand total of $5!

meredith — First stop: Wat Intharawihan to see...

...the giant Standing Buddha!

It's over a hundred feet tall and took the monks over 60 years to build!

After visiting the Wat, we stopped by a nearby travel agency and booked a trip to Khao Sok National Park, the largest protected forest in Thailand! Meredith took a bunch of pictures of me at the ATM...

...because she thought it was hilarious that my presence didn't even cause the dog sleeping at the ATM to even look up.

After we'd finished booking our trip, we hopped back in our tuk-tuk and headed over to Wat Saket, which is more commonly known as the "Golden Mount."

meredith — Here's Meredith about halfway up the 318 stairs that wrap all the way around the Mount in a spiral and lead to...

meredith — ...an awesome view of the temple down below.

Here's the Meredith-free view of the temple. Hahaha.

Once you're up at the top, you can walk all the way around and the whole Mount offers pretty rad views of Bangkok in all directions.

I love the alien-looking water towers (or, at least that's what I think they are) that you can see in the lower right-hand side of the photo.

Here's the golden stupa that's in the middle of the roof of the Golden Mount.

On the way down from the roof, there's a giant steel box with status of the Buddha in various poses. Each pose has a separate meaning, and in front of each one, there's a slot so that people can make donations in the "name" of the pose that's most meaningful to them. (Sort of how like in the Catholic church you can light a candle or pray to different Patron Saints).

Surrounding the base of the mount are shaded parks with all sorts of ponds. Here's a lotus flower blossom!

meredith — We were also surprised to see another random name for something that included the word "labia" in it. Twice in one week!

After Wat Saket, we stopped at another wat (I forget which one)...

...but by this point we were getting hungry (and a little stupa-ed out)...

...so we decided to take the tuk tuk back towards our hotel and get...

meredith — ...something to eat! Here's Meredith holding up the crazy-looking Thai Diet Coke.

The meal started out a little rocky. I ordered something on the menu called "Delicious Peanut Bread" and when it showed up it was two slices of stale white bread cut in half and a plate of peanut sauce to dip the bread in. Booooooooo!

But the rest of the food more than made up for the poor start.

meredith — After dinner we went back the hotel to read and nap. We woke up a little after 8pm to discover that it had started raining. We donned the (sandwich-bag) ponchos we brought along (stylish!) and decided to head downtown and see what movies were playing.

An elephant-sized elephant bush!

We ended up at one of the big malls downtown. We walked around looking for some sort of local restaurant, but there weren't any in the mall so we were forced...

...to get our pizza on at Pizza Hut (ow, my stomach).

meredith — After dinner, we headed back over to the theater (where Meredith posed with the creepy life-sized Voldemort promotional display advertising the upcoming Harry Potter movie) and bought tickets to see...

...the 11pm showing of Hairspray. (Which was HUGE in Thailand because all Thai movies feature ladyboys and cross-dressing men and Hairspray features John Travolta as a cross-dressing fat lady, so all the Thais loved it).

meredith — When you're traveling, it's really easy to lose track of hte date. We got out of the movie a little after 1am and Meredith informed me that since it was after midnight...

...that it was now August 8th and we were officially two hours into my 31st birthday! Thirty-one? Holy shit, I'm old!

Wednesday, August 8th

meredith — We got up nice and early the next morning so that we could do lotsa stuff for my birthday. First thing on the list? Huge Thai Birthday Breakfast!

After breakfast, we drank some coffee and read books and relaxed and later that afternoon...

...we went over to Thailand's National Museum to get our art and history on!

Awesometown. It's always so rad to see all the mythic creatures that have evolved out of other country's religions and culture.

Snakehead Buddha?

The museum is filled with all sorts of really old Buddhist art where you can see the original Indian representations before the Thais developed their own distinct representations of the Buddha.

The museum is also filled with all sorts of huge dioramas that depict all sorts of epic battles of yore. (They used elephants as battle tanks! Elephants!)

There was also a really cool exhibit that had all sorts of drawings taken out of the pages of religious texts. (Not sure about the details because there weren't any signs in English).

But they were really pretty and interesting so I took a bunch of pictures of them.

I figured I'd post them just in case there are any nubile teens out there that read this site and are in the process of looking for original designs for the lower-back tramp-stamp they're going to get on their 18th birthdays.

Just think about how cool (not to mention spiritual!) all the girls in your dorm will think you are if you have this bad-boy on your back! GOATHEAD!

The museum is made up of a bunch of smaller buildings that aren't connected. So when you finish with one gallery, you get to walk to the next building via one of these really cool manicured outdoor gardens. This one had a really stone pond...

...that was filled with pure white and pure black koi fish.

After four hours of walking around, we'd only managed to see a little more than half the exhibits, but we were getting hungry and were starting to feel "museum-ed out." So I busted out my guidebook to see what vegetarian restaurants were nearby.

meredith — We ended up going to a place near Khao San called Mai Kaidee's and it was some of the best vegetarian food I've ever eaten in my life. Holy, cramoly. I've since found out that she's pretty famous and runs a vegetarian cooking school and even has a recipe book! Right after we'd sat down to eat, it started pouring rain! We took our time eating and tried to wait out the rain.

Around 4:30pm, the rain finally let up and we headed down Khao San road towards the D&D Inn to nap and relax (what's better than vacation?).

Meredith woke me up at 6pm to give me my birthday present: A yellow "King Shirt!" The Thai absolutely LOVE their monarch. Seriously, it's hard to explain unless you go there and see it in person. Anyway, each day of the week has a color associated with it. Monday's color is yellow and since the king was born on a Monday, yellow is the king's color. And every Monday, pretty much everyone in Thailand wears yellow to honor the king!

Here's the king's insignia! (Now that I'm back in NYC, I wear this shirt on Monday's and go to Thai restaurants and it never fails to make the Thai people that are there smile!). Thanks for the awesome president, Mer!

The view of the giant D&D Inn sign as soon from our window.

Here's the a view of Khao San road heating up as the nightlife crowd starts wandering in. Right around 10pm, our phone rang. It was reception calling to tell me that there was a guest waiting for me in the lobby! A guest? Well, that could only mean that...

jeremy — ...my friend Jeremy had arrived! I met Jeremy in 1994 at Keystone College in La Plume, PA. (Keystone College was a junior college for fuckups and I went there for two years before I transferred to Syracuse to finish my degree). After leaving Keystone, Jeremy moved to California, got involved with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living Foundation and after traveling around India as a musician, ended up moving to Bangkok in 2005 to teach at an International School.

We'd lost touch for years, but he somehow stumbled across pictures from my first trip to Thailand and emailed me to know that he was living in Thailand! We caught up via email and I promised that if I ever came back to Thailand, I'd get in touch and we'd get together! And sure enough, we did!

jeremy, meredith — Jeremy's a vegetarian too and when he told us that he'd never been to May Kaidee's restaurant, we decided to go back there for dinner (even though we'd just eaten lunch there like 5 hours ago!). Hahaha.

jeremy, me — Yay! Best birthday ever!

jeremy, meredith — After dinner, I had to go to an international calling center and call the founder of Yodle to talk about a potential job opportunity. (I ended up turning down the job a couple of days later, but six months later after the company had grown a bit, I ended up taking it and started there in April of 2008 as their Director of Product Management. Woot!).

Anyway, while I was away on this call, Jeremy took Meredith out for a couple of buckets (he doesn't drink) and when I met back up with them they'd decided that they were taking me to...

jeremy — ...the infamous Nana Plaza for my birthday! Nana Plaza is one of Bangkok's really famous red light districts (and was featured prominently in John Burdett's book Bangkok 8 that I was reading at the time). The place is sort of a mind fuck. At the onset it seems like any other bikini go-go bar, except that the girls there are all prostitutes. They each have numbers on their bikinis so you can order them (!!!).

Most of the girls there are from small rural towns in the middle of nowhere and are sent to Bangkok to work in the sex trade so they can earn money for their families. They realized right away that our group wasn't there for sex, but thought it was really funny that we were just there to hang out and have fun. (And they all LOVED the fact that Jeremy spoke pidgin Thai).

me, meredith — The night was really funny. The girls also LOVED Meredith's big blue eyes and kept telling her that they didn't usually "go with" other ladies but that if she was interested in one of them "that was ok." Hahaha. We ended up getting really drunk and hanging out with the girls and answering a lot of questions about life in New York City.

jeremy — Jeremy and his ladyfriend!

meredith — Meredith and one of the girls who wanted her to know that it would "be okay." Hahaha

Me with my crown of flowers that was given to me when the girls found out we were out celebrating my birthday!

jeremy, meredith — At 2am, the bars closed and we wandered around Nana Plaza talking to people and watching the madness of drunk tourists scrambling to secure "company" for the night. Here's Meredith and Jeremy posing with a kid who was selling flowers that wouldn't leave Jeremy alone because he thought it was so funny that Jeremy spoke some Thai. Hahaha. (Bonus points to the little kid for flipping the bird).

Meredith was totally blown away by all the Thai ladyboys walking around and all sorts of questions about them that Jeremy couldn't answer - so Jeremy being Jeremy, he proceeded to ask every single ladyboy that passed Meredith's questions. Some of which included "Do you still have a penis?" and "When men hire you, do they want you to act like a man or a woman?"

Most ladyboys are not shy AT ALL so when Jeremy started asking questions like this, it led to AWESOMENESS. My favorite part of the night was when Jeremy was asking a ladyboy a bunch of questions and working up to the "Do you still have a penis" part, the ladyboy was like "All your questions are making me excited. Here, I want you to feel my excitement" and proceeded to put Jeremy's hand right on the erection that was starting to form inside her miniskirt! Hahahaha.

The best part was, Jeremy wasn't even phased by it. He just laughed and then was like "So, if I wanted to party with you, how much would it cost and what would we do?" The lady put Jeremy's hand back on her penis and was like "1,500 Baht. You fuck me..." (then she leaned in and lowered her voice to a man's timbre and finished) "...then I FUCK YOU!" Hahahah. Oh, man. It was epic.

jeremy, meredith — After we'd finished talking to the ladyboys, we walked through all the night markets...

meredith — ...and we ended up buying and eating some sliced durian!

If you don't know, the durian is Thailand's most famous fruit. It's really, really weird and smelly. The best description of it that I've ever read was written by British explorer Alfred Russel Wallace all the way back in the late 1800s:

This pulp is the edible part, and its consistence and flavour are indescribable. A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes.

Here's Meredith digging in!

jeremy — Jeremy's a seasoned pro. He was like "No biggie. I eat this all the time."

jeremy — After our durian experience, Jeremy took the three of us into some hotel's lobby so that he could loudly play the piano for us and sing (at 3am). Needless to say, he only made it about halfway through his first song before the management insisted that we leave. Hahahaha.

jeremy — After getting kicked out of the hotel for our late night piano playing, we wandered around the streets for a little while longer checking out the seedy underbelly of Bangkok's nightlife. And then a little after 3am, we said farewell to Jeremy (he had to get up early the next morning and get his classroom ready for the coming school year) and headed back to our hotel.

We got home just before 4am and Meredith busted out a cake that she'd picked up from a bakery earlier that day when I was napping! That little sneak! We were way too full and drunk to even think about eating it, so decided to save it for the morning and called it a night! Thanks for coming out on my birthday, Meredith & Jeremy! I had an amazing time!