Things are going well here and we are really settling in. At the end of August we had our first visitor. Rick’s brother, Paul, was in Asia on a big business trip and headed out to Bangkok for a weekend to check out our new digs. Of course, we weren’t in the house yet so he got a taste of apartment living, instead. It was really nice to see someone from home….and to have some delivery service from home, too! Paul brought all kinds of important stuff like Leah’s birthday presents, bubble gum (hard to find here!), and Oxi Clean, just to name a few things! Let’s just say his suitcase was a lot lighter when he left Bangkok!
We did try to get out and about and see some tourist kind of stuff while Paul was here, too. We headed out to Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn, with the intention of going to the Royal Palace after that. Wat Arun was really neat (See pictures below!) and a bit different from many of the other temples around here. Because of the protests going on in Bangkok, we took kind of an indirect route to get there (not a good idea to drive through the middle of an angry mob!) and the kids got to have their first ferry ride across the river. The water was muddy brown, like all the rivers here, and full of floating plants. The kids, however, liked it anyhow! We also went to the Temple of the Reclining Buddha (can’t remember the name in Thai) and saw a giant gold Buddha figure that was easily 100 feet long! The kids got a kick out of putting little 1 baht (Thai currency) coins in the collecting jars in there….I believe there are 100 jars and they put a baht in each one! We were headed to the Royal Palace after that but didn’t make it over…it had already been a long day and we were tired from the heat and humidity, so we headed home. That night we took Paul out for some really good Thai food, though, at a restaurant right on the river near us. And Sunday we headed to Chatuchuk market…..a weekend flea market that covers acres and acres. It’s like a dollar store that goes on and on and on and on! You can find absolutely anything there from handmade furniture to pets to used shoes to Thai crafts to silk flowers to silk fabric to magazines from 1986…you get the idea! We also hit one of the big malls downtown, MBK, for some electronics, had lunch at Hard Rock Café Bangkok, and the of all that, the kids thought riding on the BTS sky train (raised commuter train through Bangkok) was the most exciting!
Here’s some pictures of the weekend:
(by the way, the one of Leah and the little statue is funny….she saw that statue and said, “Look, that queen is holding the remote for the TV!” )
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