Temple of Dawn

Wat Arun is on the west bank of the Chao Phraya river. It's believed that after fighting the Burmese army in Ayutthaya King Taksin arrived at this temple just as dawn was breaking. He later had the temple renovated and renamed it the Temple of the Dawn. The spire of Wat Arun is over 70 meters high, delicately decorated with tiny pieces of coloured glass and Chinese porcelain. What looks almost dirty from a distance truly is beautiful when viewed up close.

We slowely made it up the large steps to a lovely view point just below the spire. From there you could see modern Bangkok off in the distance. While Bangkok is filled with many lovely and very colorful temples this one was the most impressive to me. It seemed subtle and majestic compared to the everything surrounding it.

Buddha get's tired of sitting sometimes

Wat Pho in downtown Bangkok is a buddhist temple famous for it's large reclining Buddha, it's also known as the birthplace of traditional Thai massage. The lovely temple is named after a monastery in India where Buddha is believed to have lived. As Cassie and I lined up to enter the temple with hundreds of other curious visitors we knew this would test our patience. The walking space to view the lying buddha was large enough for only a few folks, most certainly not hundreds. After shuffling with the crowds for a while we quickly made it to the exit, but not before we captured a few funny photos of our fellow visitors.

Tube socks never go out of style

It's easy when you get to a large city to start checking off all the major sites, which we seem to always do. What's not so easy is finding the truly bizzarre and wacky locations hidden in between. While walking down a side street in Bangkok one of the buildings facade caught my attention. Like usual I made Cassie stop and hold all of my stuff while I took a photo. Upon further examination it just happened to be a site I was looking for.

Nightingale-Olympic Co. Ltd. is a sports store, I think? The bottom floor is filled with aging mannequins in dusty clothes surrounded by faded off brand tennis polos and tube socks. If you follow the sweeping staircase upstairs you'll find fitness equipment sitting next to old music instruments and even some taxidermy. Is that a fat melting belt vibrater you see? Well yes it is. It was a fun store to poke around for a bit but the old ladies started getting wrestless with us so we quickly made our purchase of what looked like some used badmitton shuttlecocks and said sawasdee. 

Are my posts rotting?

One of the first things Cassie and I did once we arrived in Bangkok was jump on a boat for a ride along the Chao Phraya River. The 1.5 hour ride took us down small throughways lined with houses precariously standing on rotting posts. We were greeted with many smiles and waves from the very sweet hearted families living along the rivers edge. It was also very cute watching all the old ladies busily washing dishes and laundry on their decks.  

Walking on water

One of the things that really caught my attention while in Thailand was how much the tides changed. After spending all day swimming in the ocean with the tide in it would be shocking walking back out to the beach after my daily nap. All of a sudden you would have to walk another 200ft just to reach the salty blue ocean. Depending on the beach you could then walk out another 200ft and still be only calf deep.

After cruizing all around Koh Phangan we found a nice little dirt road leading to an empty beach with a sand bar calling our name. We ran through the shallow waters to our destination and set up a cute little picnic with fresh fruit we had just bought along the road. Since we loved our private beach so much we decided to had back into town and buy a few ice cold brews to watch the sunset with our own little slice of beach front.