Day 3 started out with the usual theme, a hangover. We finally dragged ourselves out of bed around 10am or so and got dressed to hit the grand palace, which was about a 20 or so min walk. The grand palace, however, has a dress code. So we had to wear pants and couldnt wear sandals. Bein that it was close to 90 degrees F by 10am, it was gonna be a hot day. So we ventured off in the direction towards the palace. Along the way we became a little confused by the directions. 'Fortunately' there was a 'teacher' that stopped to 'help' us. He claimed that the palace was closed for the day, BUT he knew of a cool boat ride that we could take along the river. At the time we had no idea that this guy was trying to scam us. We didnt do the boat ride thing but realized later on that telling tourists something is closed for the day, but they know of something else to do is a common way to scam tourists into doin stuff they might not normally. Dont get me wrong, I loved the Thai people and found most of them helpful and willing to provide you with info. Unfortunately there were others as well who seemed to have a different motive. Welcome to the real world Brady.
Never realizing that the palace was most likely opened we decided to head to a huge weekend market elsewhere in the city. When the cab driver dropped us off on the street we didnt think much of the market. It just looked like one side of the road lined with small stalls selling stuff. Little did we know that we were just on the outside of the market area. We walked a little ways and found one of the entrances, from there we slowly realized how big the place actually was. Lemme put it this way, we walked around for about 2 plus hrs and maybe covered half of the area...it was big yo.
Stu had a Lonely Planet travel book which we used throughout most of our trip for suggestions of things to do around Thailand. For the most part it was very helpful to us...this time is one of the times it was not.
Basically they recommended we go to this tall building in the center of Bangkok that had a restaurant on the roof, and you could watch the sunset and then the lights of the city come on. Sounds pretty cool right? Well it shoulda been but unfortunately they had a dress code. No sandals (I was wearing a pair) no sleeveless shirts (wearing a bball jersey) no shorts (and of course I was wearing shorts) Fortunately this was easily overcame because they had clothes we could 'rent.' We would have done so until we saw the menu. Lemme just say the food was slightly out of our price range, by like $100.
We ended up just gettin a cab back to our place and heading out to Ko San Road for a 3rd straight nite of boozing and people watching. Of course it was a good time, only problem was we had to wake up early the next day for our next adventure...
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