Is this your first time in thailand?

After traveling for about 30 hours we finally arrived in the city of Bangkok, Thailand yesterday afternoon.

We made a stop over in Beijing on our way -- which was memorable to say the least. We will be back there in three weeks, to start our China leg of the tour, but because we had a six hour layover, we had our tour company help us book a room for that time at The Garden Hotel near the airport. When we told our totally non-english speaking cab driver to take us to the garden hotel -- he did, but it was in downtown Beijing... a good thirty minutes away from the airport.

We had a feeling this wasnt right, but since we couldn't tell the cab driver to turn around, we just sort of went with it... when we got to the "Garden Hotel" not only was it not the right hotel, but we might as well have been trying to enter the white house. There was intense security outside, guarding the hotel -- apparently, according to Josh, King Henry was in town, but we think that might fall into the category of actually being lost in translation since... who is King Henry? The 8th? But basically no one spoke English, so we're stuck outside the barricaded hotel, with an angry cab driver. Finally, "the guy who speaks english" came out of the hotel to help us... only he didn't really speak English either. He did know the word "airport" though, which was very helpful since we decided to just give up and have our cab driver take us back to the airport.

On the ride back, I realized it would be smart to call our tour company, which is based in Seattle, because I knew all the people there spoke English and Chinese, I thought maybe they could communicate with our driver. Luckily, I did reach someone at China Spree, our tour company, and had them talk to our driver. But there was still some communication difficulty and a local Beijing-based member of the ChinaSpree company had to be contacted to talk to our cab driver. A literal game of English/Chinese telephone occurred while our driver decided to pull over in the middle of the freeway to make sure that he still wasn't driving in the wrong direction.

FINALLY - 150 yen and an hour later we made it to the correct garden hotel... five minutes away from the airport. We had a really bad breakfast -- a taste of things to come unfortunately -- consisting mostly of unidentifiable dumplings and fruit we couldn't eat. Then we passed out for an hour before heading back to the airport to board out flight to Bangkok.

The flight took off and landed uneventfully -- and we were all excited to be in Bangkok until I fell off the end of the moving walkway in the airport and landed very loudly and embarrassingly on my side... good times. You're probably thinking, doesn't Lindsey know that these walkways eventually end?, or you might be thinking, why didn't Josh warn her it was it ending, since he was facing in the right direction and she was inexplicably facing backwards? But either way... it happened and we've moved on...

We tried to avoid the sketchy, un-metered cabs at the airport by waiting in the long cab line only to find ourselves in a sketchy un-metered cab. The good news was our driver put on the cheesiest cd with bad covers of bad american songs because he said he felt bad he couldn't talk to us. (somehow that part he actually said in english). The best part of the whole drive was when he took out a back scratcher from a pouch behind the passenger seat and actually used it to scratch his back while in transit. good times.

We got to our hotel -- which is pretty basic, but clean and the air conditioner in our room is amazing, so it's all good. We showered - finally - INCREDIBLE. And headed out into the Bangkok night... which was cool, but overwhelming and smelly and crowded. Our hotel is right near Khao San Rd which is a large, mostly tourist area, with lots of street vendors, restaurants and bars advertising "very strong drinks".

We were trying to find some local food to eat, but after passing by too many unappetizing heaps of unidentifiable food we sat down in an Italian, tourist-filled restaurant and both had cheese pizza for dinner. Yay for thailand...

After a five dollar, half-hour INCREDIBLE thai foot massage right inside our hotel lobby -- we were passed out in bed by TEN pm. Luckily our air conditioned drowned out the sounds of the party outside our window.

This morning (sunday) we were up bright and early, thanks to the jetlag. We set off to find some breakfast and explore the city... we had hoped this would be easy. Not so much. First of all, everyone we've passed on the street has tried to give us directions to somewhere. Many of them are just trying to scam you. Others just seem to lie for no reason -- we had two different people tell us that the Grand Palace was closed this morning, which is totally not true. Why are they lying to us? No one knows... many of the people on the street are trying to get you to ride around in their tuk tuk by promising you that they'll take you everywhere you want to go for 5 bhat. That is the equivalent of 10 cents. A normal cab or tuk tuk ride costs about 60 bhat. SKETCH BALL. (Also, a tuk tuk is kind of like a motorcycle with a big backseat - we tried to add a picture, didn't work - just google it if you don't know what it is. Also, it was featured on an episode of America's Next Top Model - the go sees in bangkok? yeah, you know what I'm talking about.)

In case you were wondering we finally did find a non-sketchy tuk tuk driver to take us somewhere and even though Josh didn't want to ride in it because it had no seat belts, I prevailed. We will not be riding it again. Haha.

After getting off to a rather rough start, we made it to the Golden Mount, a pretty cool temple. We made our way back to our hotel to have breakfast at the Chabad house, which is right across the street from our hotel. Also, there is great falafel. I know this because we came back here again for lunch. Actually we are here now using the free Internet. Potentially we might be having dinner here... jewish much?

In between breakfast and lunch we finally made it to the Grand Palace - which was NOT closed. And so cool. Gold and beautiful and incredible. Pictures to follow.

It is incredibly hot... we're sweating. But having a blast... we meet up with our tour group tonight in the hotel lobby and then head up north for a few days. We'll be back in Bangkok next weekend...

more to come....

-- Lindsey & Josh