the beginning of an amazing vacation

after being gone for 17 days of amazing vacation, i have finally returned. and let me tell you... it was way harder than i thought. we made it back yesterday around 4pm and after the bus ride home, finally got to my apartment around 5:15. after being up for more than 24 hours because of the red-eye flight we took and my lack of ability to sleep on the plane, i was ready to crash. 

so over the next few days/this week i will be updating my photos and here with stuff from my trip. i'm going to break it down by different locations and activities we did. it's just going to be easier that way. so to start.... 


getting to bangkok...

we flew out of incheon on the morning of the 12th. i had to be up at 4am and at the airport by 6am. so early... our flight was delayed out of incheon, which made us worry about our transfer in shanghai. let me just tell you... transferring in shanghai was a complete pain! when you get off the plane in china, you have to go through immigration, which means you get a stamp in your passport that you have "entered" china, but you can't leave the airport because you don't have a visa to visit. so while going through immigration, the guys says to us, "you only have 20 minutes till the plane boards" DUH... hurry up so we can go. steph and i end up finally finding someone to tell us where to go and we sprint from one section of the airport, up to the 2nd floor and come to another immigration spot, which has a giant line... again. WHAT?!?! yes after running through the airport for maybe 10 minutes we had to stand in line again to "leave" china. so dumb. once through the line, we sprinted again to our gate because we were running out of time... we finally get there with 2 minutes to spare, only to find out our flight is delayed 2.5 hours. lovely... just lovely. 

we finally arrived in bangkok at 7pm. we booked a temple and city tour while we were at the airport, took a local taxi and finally arrived to our hostel, only to be caught in a downpour of rain. boo. when we left korea it was raining, and we were really hoping the weather would be better in thailand, (even though we did know it was rainy season there). 

overall, bangkok was not the greatest. we were told by multiple people before we left that they did not enjoy bangkok when they were there, but we kept our thoughts positive... well they were right. we were there for 3.5 days and it was WAY too long. we said if we were to do the trip over, we would stay in bangkok 2 days at the most and then move on. 

day one involved us getting up at 6am to meet our tour guide for the tiger temple and the floating market. first stop, was the floating market. we were ushered into a boat and driven around the canal where there were huts lining the canal selling all sorts of things. it was pretty cool! 

boat ride :)

selling fresh fruit and veggies

boat traffic jam... so many boats everywhere.

 
after the floating market, we headed to the war memorial. there are prisoners of war many different countries. 

after the war memorial, we were taken to the bridge over the river kwai. we were told a little bit about the history of the bridge and then were given a chance to walk over the bridge and take pictures. afterwards, we at lunch on the floating restaurant at the bottom of the bridge. 

bridge over the river kwai

river kwai

after lunch we headed to the tiger temple. it's a large preserve basically, where they have wild animals, many are tigers. they have a whole schedule for the tigers, including feedings, exercise, naps. all of the tigers are accompanied by a monk, who is basically their trainer. we also learned that there is an opportunity to volunteer at the tiger temple. you live in housing that is provided, work at the preserve, meditate with the monks each day. it seemed pretty cool. when we went around to take pictures, it was nap time for the tigers, so most of them were asleep, but still pretty cool to be next to all of them. we did get to see some exercise time for some of the tigers.

exercise time

exercise time

at first, i couldn't tell if the tiger was asleep or dead... did not move from the position at all.

that concluded our first full day in bangkok. the second day was another tour, this time a temple and city tour. our tour guide picked us up and took us to three of the largest temples around the city. i say this because it felt like on every street corner there was some sort of temple. there are a lot of temples in korea... but thailand was ridiculously filled with them. everywhere! 

there are photographs and large signs like this all over the city. they are of the royal family. EVERYWHERE!!

solid gold buddah

us with the largest reclining buddah... huge!

this is the just the head

it was so large i couldn't even get a whole picture of it.

the artwork was amazing :)

after the tour we went to the jim thompson house. jim thompson, was from deleware and was stationed in thailand during a war. after he left the army, he moved back to thailand and lived/retired there. he built a house for himself using 6 different local hut style houses with a little modern touches. after a while he opened his house to the public. he disappeared on a trip he was on to malaysia and was never found. his house is still open to the public. 

that night we went to see a show with traditional dancing about the history of thailand. unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures or video, which is sad, because the show was awesome! we did get to eat amazing food though. (there is going to be a seperate blog just about the food.) 

interpretation of the dancing we saw

such good food

 the last day we basically had to ourselves. we slept in finally. then we adventured out to try and find something to do before we had to be at the train station for our night train to chiang mai. this is when we decided we did not like bangkok at all. we were able to figure out the subway system, which helped a little, but after walking around for a bit, there really wasn't much to do. it was all city with businesses and such. after a while we decided to go and get massages. the place we went to was actually not that great, but they had awesome tea that we wish we could have found afterwards. after wasting enough time, we decided to head to the train station and get there so we had enough time just in case. 

next up... chiang mai.