We had breakfast at the hotel which was a mission in itself, we couldn't find the breakfast room, even after asking the receptionist. It wasn't untill a man sat on the street fixing radios pointed where to go that we figured it out! We then headed to the Grand Palace, our guide book said to get there early to beat all the other tourist so we were there by about 9am. It seemed everyone else had the same plan. We started heading for the wrong gate and meet a local who told us that the Grand Palace is only open for Thai residents in the morning, I think he wanted to take us someone on his Tuk Tuk, but we just carried on and surprise surprise he was lying. It seems a shame that people here seem to have to lie to try and make money from tourists, we found this different from Malaysia (well, except the taxi driver who said there wasn't a ferry, perhaps everywhere is the same after all).
So we headed into the Grand Palace, I almost got turned away for not having long enough trousers, even though they were well below my knees! The buildings inside the Grand Palace complex are amazing, so ornate and so many of them. It's kinda expensive to get in, but worth it. We even looked round the coin museum which was pretty dull but had air con so worth it for that!
We found a really nice little cafe for lunch, it was tiny and I was amazed that the managed to serve people in there at all. I tried the green curry which was delicious and Adam had Pad Thai which was also excellent. It was also pretty cheap which is always good!
We then headed for amulet market, you never know when you might need one... We didn't actually explore the whole amulet market but we saw plenty from the stalls lining the main road.
Adam decided we should try to go on a boat, however he didn't want to do a tourist boat trip but use the public boats. We stood for quite some time trying to figure it out, a main problem being that our guide book seemed to have different boat routes marked on than the one at the jetty. We eventually decided to just got for it and see what happened, after it was only about 20p per journey! We soon realised that from the stop we were at the only way to go was simply across the river to a stop on the other side and then from there you could get a boat the went down river to various stops. It was pretty fun riding the boats and they got pretty full with lots of people standing in the middle.
We got off the ferry at the stop for Wat Po, the temple with the giant reclining buddha. And it is giant. There's also some other decorative buildings but with the heat it gets tiring very quickly so we only did a quick walk around.
As it was so hot we went back to the hotel so we could cool down with the air conditioning. We were going to buy a beer each from the 7 eleven on the corner but they have weird times when you can buy alchohol, 11 - 2 and then 5 - 12! Soft drinks for us...
After our rest we went back out to buy some dinner. We'd seen an Indian restaurant the night before which looked ok so decided to head for that. On the way we saw some fire fighters trying to put a fire at a terraced shop. I think it looked under control but one fire fighter almost fell through the roof as it gave way when he walked across it. We wandered around the markets and bought a couple of t-shirts. We also spotted some lanterns which Bee had asked us to look out for, so we asked the price and then went to have dinner whilst deciding how many we could fit in our luggage. The food was very nice, not too disimilar to the curries we get in England. We headed back out in search of the lanterns, we saw them on a different stall and bought all the ones she had in the suitable colours, this involved taking the display ones as well. We then went back and bought the ones from the first stall. We must have looked slightly obsessive about lanterns! Getting them back to the room I realised they took more space than perhaps I'd intended but I guess it's all in the duty of being a good bridesmaid! (I think we might need to send another parcel home!)
We packed up our stuff ready to leave the hotel at 4.30 to catch our flight to Siem Reap, Cambodia. Unfortunately it was a bad end to the day as I realised I had left my Ipod and Nintendo DS on the previous flight. I remember taking them out of my bag but not putting them back. I guess worse things could happen so I should be grateful it's just replacable stuff which isn't essential anyway, just I'll have some long train rides with no music to look forward to now.
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