Day 38: Bangkok (Valentine's Day)

I'll start with my dinner, before I forget what I ate.  Tonight I ate a dish I'd never had before, but it would be really easy to reproduce:  Vegetable fried rice with pineapple and cashews.  The veggies were pretty standard: onions, carrots, peppers, eggs and lima beans.  But the pineapple and cashews were new to me.  If you want to be fancy, you can serve it in the pineapple shell:

Oh, and I've discovered I love juice when it's real juice and not that concentrated crap I usually get back home.  I never really liked juice before, but I've been drinking it with almost every meal for the past few weeks.  When I get back home, I'll splurge on the real stuff.  That's a blueberry smoothie, if you're wondering.

The Buddha's doctor.

I took a riverboat ferry to one of the more touristy parts of town to see the Wat Phra Kaew (aka the Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and the Grand Palace.  Taking the ferry was pretty easy -- a guide announced each stop and even told us what we could see there -- but getting to it in the first place was a pain in the ass.  On the map, it looked really simple:  Just walk to the river and find the dock.  Except that the dock was tantalizingly out of reach behind fences, gates and walls.  I could see and I couldn't get to it.  I must have walked for 20 minutes through mazes of old streets before giving up and moving down the river to the next dock.  Oh well, I got to see some new neighborhoods that way.  And I somehow wound up on the campus of a girls' elementary school and wandered around it for at least 5 minutes looking for an exit to the dock.  I kept waiting for someone to stop me (being the only non-thai there, and without any children in tow) but they didn't.

Just outside the Emerald Buddha's temple.

My only complaint about the Wat and Grand Palace is that everything is restored to its original glory (I'm pretty sure).  I say complaint, but I don't mean I disliked it -- it was dazzling, as I hope the photos show.  But very little of it, except for things inside, is original.  I would have liked to see parts of it maintained in its "natural" state, to show the signs of age and to show what the builders were capable of without modern tools and paints.  The compound has a small museum with some of the original pieces, though, so I got a glimpse of it.

Temple guardians.

3 of 8 towers commemorating the life of the Buddha.

This is a door.  And I want it.

Today was the first day on my trip that I was annoyed by all the other tourists.  There were so many in a relatively small space.  Of course they want to see the same things as I do -- that's part of why we all came to Bangkok -- but I'd grown accustomed over the last few weeks to having sites all to myself.  Even at the Pyramids, there was so much room to spread out that people can easily escape the masses.  No big deal.  I think a couple of blisters and two really tired legs added to my irritation.  I might need another massage tomorrow lol.