We all had a pretty good sleep last night, and we needed that. We are officially on Thailand time, which is 11 hours behind EST. We had breakfast downstairs since it’s included with our room. It was an unusual selection of foods, and included green curry chicken, fried rice, bread, cereal, fruits, spaghetti with meat sauce, eggs, yogurt, and something like French toast.

We decided today, thanks to Erika’s research (yes that surprised me too), to take a water taxi up the Chao Phraya River, thinking we could take that to the Grande Palace and walk around. We took a cab there, and he kept thinking we wanted a longboat tour, so when he dropped us at the wrong place, he was very kind to, take us to the right place. A full day pass that included a hop on and off feature cost us about 5.50. Not too bad. We went past some of the following things: River City Bangkok (high end shopping), Holy Rosary Church, Chinatown, we decided to get off at Wat Arun, also known as the Temple of the Dawn. It was constructed before 1665 and named after a Hindu god. The architecture is representative of Mount Meru, the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology. It was all white and decorated with broken pieces of Chinese porcelain. It looked gray from afar though. Erika and Matt walked up to the first level, but Bowman and I chickened out, because of steep steps and no railings.

After Wat Arun we jumped back on the water taxi and our next stop was the Tha Maharaj Pier, for the Grande Palace. On our way there we enjoyed the sites from the boat, but the water was very dirty/polluted, and you could see an ornate or expensive building right next to houses that were made from signs and junk, with laundry hanging out to dry. It was tough to see knowing 90 million dollars was spent on the cremation ceremony for the king.

I don’t think I mentioned this earlier but it was VERY hot today. The temperature said 93, but it felt more like 110. You couldn’t stand in the sun for long, and boy did we all sweat. We walked the route from the ceremony on Thursday, and were disappointed we couldn’t go inside the white walls surrounding the Grande Palace. Mourners were all dressed in black. We saw shrines for the king, flower decorations and monks.

We walked past Wat Po, the reclining Buddha, since we’d be back on the tour. We walked the main street, Maha Rat Road and past the Museum of Siam, and stopped for lunch at a little place with air conditioning. I have to say the Thai food here is really not that much different than what we have at home, which was surprising. The street was lined with shops, street food vendors, and shops selling just about everything. I couldn’t take enough photos. Our next destination was Pakklomg Taladd flower market. Little confusing, and we went to veggie market first, but eventually found the flower market. It was huge, had unique flowers that were new to us, a variety of arrangements, people riding scooters through the market, but not as many people buying flowers as expected. We were way past the best time to get there, which was 2am.

After the market, we took the water taxi back to Sathorn, where we started, caught a cab home and decided to chill before dinner. Erika and Matt had an odd smell in their room, and fortunately they moved them, and got an upgrade. Yeah! So day two was busy, hot, tiring and overall pretty cool.