Friday, July 11th, 2014
Due to technical difficulties, I don’t have a way of getting photos from my camera to the blog at the moment so apologies for the lack of photos today!
Conveniently, the main sights in Bangkok are right next door to each other so on Wednesday we visited the Grand Palace and Wat Po. We took our first trip on the sky train and then a ferry along the river. There seemed to be a special tourist ferry which they probably charge extra but we didn’t clock this until we’d purchased tickets and stood in a queue only to see all the Thais in a different queue next to us. But the tourist one was still only 80p each way so can’t complain too much!
Wat Po is a temple complex, the main attraction in which is a 43m long reclining gold Buddha which was pretty impressive. Unsurprisingly got one of the main attractions, the temples weren’t very peaceful!
The Grand Palace is right next door and divided into two parts, another temple complex and the palace. The temple complex contains a jade Buddha called The Emerald Buddha. He was actually quite small but sits on top of a huge gold display. He has three outfits to wear each year, for summer, winter and rainy season. The king presides over an official ceremony to change the outfit each time. I was a bit disappointed that his rainy season outfit didn’t include we’ll boots and an umbrella!
The palace complex is made up of a number of large halls, where we saw the a few thrones ….. more gold … But other than the outside of the buildings, not that much to see.
In the evening we had a quick nap before heading over to Khao San Road to watch the football. We found a 24 hour ‘Irish’ bar which looked like it had some good drink deals. We arrived around midnight and there was a live band and the place was full of young Thais, not what we expected in KSR, but apparently it’s the best place to watch the football! Just after 2am, we tried to order a couple of beers but were told they could no longer serve alcohol because of the soldiers. We decided then that maybe this wouldn’t be the best place to watch so decided to head back to our hotel area. When we walked back onto the street, the atmosphere had definitely died down with a couple of police cars outside and most the street sellers gone. In the taxi back to the hotel we went past some military police, but this was the first time we saw any evidence of the military coup. Not sure why they were not allowing alcohol, maybe that’s the law and a blind eye is normally turned or maybe due to the large numbers of people gathering that night for the football. Luckily the 24 hour Italian near our hotel was showing it!
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