and quite frankly, I'm jetlagged and tired. Seems a good reason to be blogging and not being out and about.
I started the day off right - with chocolate and coffee. Thus armed, I confronted Wat Phra Kaeo - site of the famous (and very small) Emerald Buddha and the Grand Palace. The temple was bright, colorful, and looked like a movie set. There were busloads of tourists too - and a few actual worshipers.
(I took a bunch of pictures, and I'm having trouble getting them uploaded. I'm a little too tired to care right now, but I'll undoubtedly try harder tomorrow, when my card starts running out of space.)
Anyway, I admired the temple for a while, enjoyed the absence of Starbucks, and wandered around lost until the heat got to me. I'd planned to also visit Wat Pho, another temple - this time with a large reclining Buddha, but then I made a new vacation rule about only seeing one temple a day. I therefore headed to the National Museum.
The National Museum is a strange place. It is dim and dusty, with a collection that clearly has no theme. The strangest thing I saw there was a Western-style dollhouse, whose only claim to fame was that it had been owned by some princess or something. (Clearly demonstrating that royalty is indeed different. My discarded toys ended up thrown away or recycled.) It wasn't even old. It was kind of similar to putting Barbie in a museum.
I wandered around trying to escape the many school groups that chose the same day to visit the museum. They were shepherded around by a teacher with a loudspeaker, and they were remarkably well behaved.
I'm now in Khao San, which is backpacker-paradise. Cheap t-shirts, fake music and software, forged ID cards compete for space in this narrow street. It looks interesting - hey, a girl has to shop! - and the rain has died down, so I'm off to wander some more.
Cheers!
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