Bangkok!

On December 24th (Christmas Eve), I arrived at the airport in Bangkok (yes, the one that was closed recently due to protesters - don't worry, that's all been cleared up for now) sometime before 6 a.m. and called Chris. He told me which bus to catch, which didn't prove too difficult to find, and I headed to a market near his place called "Happyland". A unplanned change of buses and a lucky guess later and I managed to make it without too much trouble. I walked into the market and instantly realized I had just walked into gastronomic paradise! Everything smelled amazing! While waiting for Chris to show up, I got some breakfast - green curry. It was about as good as I've ever had (and I'm very picky about my thai green curries). *grin* Chris finally showed up and we headed to his place to drop off my stuff and rest for a moment before heading out on the town. He had a big long list of places to show me, and of course we only made it to a very few, but it was a good overall representation of Bangkok. We started with a random museum we passed on our way. It was originally a prince and princess's palace turned museum. It had a lot of interesting things to look at, including a lot of depictions of the Ramakien (the Thai version of the Ramayana - a Hindu epic). That was pretty cool as I'm currently reading a version of the Ramayana. After the museum we made our way to the Victory Monument, which is pretty much just a major hub in the city for buses. Then we headed to the Teak Mansion and throne halls. The Teak Mansion was beautiful, but alas no pictures were allowed, inside or out. I was able to take some outside photos of the throne halls though. Then we went to Wat B, a buddhist temple that's pictured on the 5 baht coin. (Wat means temple - also, see photos for full name of the wat, it's far too long to spell out.) After the seeing the wat we took a very long bus ride back and stopped at Happyland again for some mustamun curry for dinner. Then we headed to Chris' place and crashed.

The next morning was Christmas day, but it was very hard to remember that fact as the day progressed. Thailand is almost exclusively Buddhist, and they don't celebrate Christmas at all, so the only places you saw any sort of decoration was at touristy hotels and a few of the bigger malls. I slept in Christmas morning while Chris worked on his resume, which he had to send out that day. Then we headed out towards the school Chris works at. (He teaches English to Thai students in secondary school.) We stopped at a market near the school for some fried rice and then walked over to the school to meet some of his fellow teachers. After that we stopped for a Thai massage. Thai massages are great, but a bit different than your usual Swedish style massage. It's like yoga in some ways, and it seems like quite the workout for the person giving the massage. My only tiny complaint is that they don't focus on the back and shoulders nearly enough for my tastes, otherwise it was very good. After the massages we headed to the airport for our flight to Chiang Mai.