Month: April 2016
K&A In Thailandia: BANGKOK AND KHAO SAN ROAD
Bangkok is a big city. And if you’re spending any time there I really recommend checking out JJ Market one day – it’s a huge market where you can stock up on all your Thai souvenirs. I spent a few hours in there any felt like I was suffocating with all the options.
For those who are into Muay Thai, you can watch some fights at an arena just across the street from JJ Market. I’m not so much interested in the fights, so I spent an afternoon walking around the market while Airec went to see Muay Thai. 
Nightlife in Bangkok seems to happen in little pockets scattered about. But the main attraction is Khao San Road. This street is lined with bars and clubs, and for some reason struck me as a smaller, Asian Vegas. Everyone’s stumbling through the bars and debauchery runs rampant. Like I said, Bangkok is a big city so if you’re going out you’ve basically gotta commit to a specific neighborhood for the evening. Khao San is actually a couple of blocks wide and has a lot of options, so you never feel limited and definitely will not get bored. 
Between jetlag, heat and dehydration, we rode the struggle bus all over Bangkok. It was a good time though.
Stay tuned for an update on the next leg of our trip – The Islands! 😍
K&A In Thailandia: Arriving in BANGKOK and Lopburi
It’s been quite some time since Koko and Airec last got together for a blog post. Life has thrown us in all different directions but here we are now, traveling the rich lands of Thailandia. There is so much to do here and so much to see. Not saying that we didn’t have time to timely write a blog post every day (we did but I mean, we’re in fucking Thailand) but it was hard to sit down and stare at a screen when we could have been riding a train to a distant city or playing with monkeys or falling off a motor-scooter. So we decided to split each city into its own blog post. And what better city to start off with than Thailand’s capital: Bangkok.
After arriving at separate times (Koko holding down the fort at Khaosan River Inn), we were finally reunited after three years at 4am. We drank a few beers, exchanged stories from the void and talked about finally embarking on our wanderlust.
On the first full day of our trip, we got to see temples and MONKEYS!!! We woke up around 11am and got our shit together and headed to the train station. We would have gotten up earlier, but I arrived super late and we drank some beers and these kids from Russia were loud as hell, but then what did we expect, we were in a hostel.
It was a hot and humid train ride from Bangkok to Lopburi. The ride was approximately 3.5 hours . . . one way. And we were already burning daylight. It’s a good thing that the town was small and getting around on foot was easy. Aside from all the KFC advertisements and 7-11, we noticed that the town was full of free roaming monkeys! Well, Crab-eating macaque to be exact. The city was flooded with them, running around, taking food from humans and I didn’t want to stand around to find out if they fling dung. That is a first world fear my friends, and this fear was ever so real when we entered the Phra Kan Shrine. After paying a few baht we got to enter the old Buddhist temple and . . . you guessed it . . . played with monkeys!!!
Getting manhandled by little baby monkeys was an experience. Needless to say, they loved Koko more than they loved me. Which I didn’t mind actually, so HA, jokes on them. We ran across the street after that to check out a live Wat (or temple for those of you who aren’t Asian or explorers). We didn’t get in though since our stomachs and bladders were winning the course of action. We found a local restaurant where I got some instant noodles with some pork and Koko got some iced coffee. I remembered sitting down there and it reminded me of my time in child labor. I mean, helping my parents with their restaurant, on my own free will of course 😦
For those of you who weren’t born in an immigrant Asian family, well, you had a different childhood, I tell you what. The food was good, and cheap (even though prices were determined on the spot by two different people but it was still cheap and I didn’t care).
All of the eating though got my tummy a working. Walking to the toilets (they don’t call them restrooms in Asia, cause you don’t really want to rest in there) before we headed out for the Kings Palace, I encountered three things that I will soon become familiure with in Thailand: Paying to use the toilet and there’s no toilet seat but a porcelain hole in the ground and no toilet paper!
I was not prepared for this with my first-world mentality and decided to wait till I got back to the hostel. When I returned to Koko, I shared my amazement in the third world and she tried to educate me on how developing countries do it. After she explained to me about how to use the water and your hands and washing your hands, I was still not sold on this method of up-and-coming countries’ toilet practices. Which then got me to wonder about her own toilet experiences in South Africa, but that’s not for this blog post.
The final place we visited was Phra Narai Ratchaniwet, or The Kings Palace.
It was a long day and an even longer train ride. When it was all said and done we were ready to head back to the hostel and rest until the next day of adventures . . . Which will be BANGKOK AND KHAO SAN ROAD!!!
Bonus picture: Cute little baby
Inside the Dark Minds of Koko and Airec 