Thursday, October 28, 2010

Dirty Dancing in the Elevator

Photos: Thailand: Dirty Dancing

On Thursday morning, Jeff and I joined Jan for breakfast, waited with her for a taxi and then waved her off. Jan was headed home, with an eight hour layover in Hong Kong and an overnight layover in Los Angeles. Whew!

Jeff and I promptly went back to bed once Jan was gone. Well, ok, not really. But we did laze around for several more hours, taking our time with uIMG_0658pdating blogs, surfing the internet, answering e-mails, pondering our plans for the next few days, and showering. Finally, we got our butts out the door and into a cab to Wat Pho (pronounced “Po”). Traffic was pretty bad, so it took awhile to get there, but we eventually did. We hired a guide who offered up a decent price, but he was terrible! The Wat was wonderful, and we saw the actual reclining Buddha, which is huge, but our guide pretty much commandeered Jeff’s camera and kept telling us to “Please to go here, please to go stand there, please to get in the light” every three seconds. Jeff now has about fifty pictures of me and him standing in various places in the Wat. We learned very little about the actual Wat or anything, though.

One interesting part of the tour was where we exchanged a fifty baht note for two little cups of small coins. The idea was to walk along a wall which had large pots filled with coins all along it. There were probably thirty of the large pots and we were to walk along, putting a coin in each pot and making a good wish. Something like, “I wish for good luck” and so on. I know it may be hard to believe, but it was hard to make thirty-odd good wishes without repeating! Especially under pressure (the line was moving along at a good clip). Jeff and I talked about it later and I found it strange that in general, people can sit and complain all day about the things they don’t like or the things that are wrong, but it’s really tough to actually wish for thirty-something good things!

IMG_0673The highlight of Wat Pho was the reclining Buddha. He’s 40-something meters long and pretty high as well. His toes are pretty intricate and the soles of his feet are inlaid mother-of-pearl in various designs and pictures. It actually takes a full minute or two to walk along the length of him and his golden head and body just seem perfectly at rest there. It was a neat look at another aspect of the Thai belief system.

After our hour-long photo shoot in Wat Pho, we started looking for lunch. We wandered past the Grand Palace, which is just across from Wat Pho, and eventually picked a place. It ended up being Rub Arun, which was mentioned in Jeff’s “Top 10 Bangkok” book, even though we didn’t do that intentionally. The meal was good, but the highlight for me was the coconut juice, served in a coconut. Yum! We then decided to catch a cab and head to Jim Thompson’s house, a museum centered around the man who made Thai silk famous. Unfortunately, traffic was just a total crap shoot, and we were in that cab for over an hour. We diverted him to our hotel since the museum closed while we were in the cab, but we did discover that there’s a Jim Thompson Silk store, which we hadn’t known.

After a break relaxing in our room and cooling off, we headed out and took the sky train to near the silk place where Jeff had to pick up his mom’s dress and I tried on my sky blue sand-washed silk suit. There were a few adjustments that needed to be made to my suit, but luckily nothing major. We made arrangements to pick up the final garment on Saturday and then headed to the Mango Tree, a restaurant nearby that was well-reviewed in Jeff’s guidebook. It turned out that the food was good, but not spectacular. However, the price was right and the ambiance of the place was top-notch, with water-reflected light playing over a pretty stone wall, palm trees, misting sprays and a general sense of a high-end fancy restaurant. We had a nice time talking over life issues that aren’t issues yet and just enjoying the live jazz being played in the indoor part of the restaurant.

Then we headed home and relaxed and crashed, tired from our overly lazy day.  Well worth it! All day we were being silly. For example, we decided to make up an elaborate story if our guide asked us about being a couple or getting married, since he kept making references to this. Also, the name of this blog entry owes mostly to Jeff, who, on our way back up to our room, began dirty dancing, grinding against me in the elevator.

Boys are silly, don’t you think?

--Z

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