Bangkok Pictures [1]

The Bangkok group! Left to right, Lane Clark, Kevin Kitchens, Carlanna Cunningham, Bart Stout, Marianna Jewell, Kristen Kerns, me, and Jay Hennington. We booked our tickets together and stayed in the same hostel (in the same room, actually - we booked the 12-bed dorm). There were 12 other people from our GT group who also went to Bangkok and were on our flight, but they stayed in a different hostel.

This is our hostel, Big John's Guesthouse. They had awesome internet, a 24hour cafe and bar, and they were really good for advice about places to go and see and everything. I thought it was a little dodgy in the beginning, but I ended up liking it a lot.

Thai is about as far from the English language as you can get. It's right up there with Chinese and Arabic in my book. The keyboards had both lettering systems on them, and you had to make sure that you were typing in English.

We rode the SkyTrain a lot in Bangkok because it was a really easy way to get around the city. It's kind of like an above-ground subway system. They have signs asking people to give their seats up to the eldery and little children and everything (which I have seen before), but I have never seen one asking me to give up my seat to a monk.

I also don't typically see Muslim praying rooms in the airports back home.

When we headed up to the temples from our hostel, we had to trek all the way across town. We decided to shorten the walk by taking a water taxi up the river to the temples. Rather than take a taxi, we bargained to hire this lovely boat. We didn't actually see the boat before bargaining for it, but I was very excited once I saw it. It was way cool to be zipping along the river in a boat like this. We were very close to the water and going very quickly, and the boat was very colorful (as you can see above).

Along the river, we passed a lot of ports, and many of them had very decorative entrances. This was the style of a lot of the temples that we saw.