Travelling to Thailand Part 2: The Temples and The Show

After some not-too-subtle prodding from my friends, I managed to summon up enough effort to make this post (I’m just too busy and too tired since…mid-October?). Yeah, it’s weird to make a blog title with a “Part 1” without doing the Part 2, hurhur

The next two days of our trip was spent on looking through the key temples in Bangkok and going through the usual tourist route. After we made our out-of-town arrangements at the travel agency, we took the train then the boat (with a very entertaining “travel emcee” on board) and crossed the Chao Praya River to go to the Ta Chang area.

We got off the boat and just followed the traffic to find Wat Pho where the Golden Buddha is located. It was huge and pretty impressive. Since there are only the two of us, and we don’t want to hassle people too much by constantly asking them to take our picture, my cousin mastered the quick transition to setting up the tripod and the timer. We were pretty efficient with this method for all the temples, we got all the shots we wanted with no skewed framing. Good job to us, lol.

Someone in the area told us that there’s an upcoming event at the Grand Palace so we decided to stop by at Wat Arun across the river even though it’s not in our priority list. It was a good call that we went here, there are less tourists and the architecture is detailed and unique. It doesn’t have the “bling” compared to Wat Pho and Grand Palace, which is a welcome diversion in my book.

 We went to the Grand Palace (actually two days after the first two temples, apparently the “event” at the Grand Palace when we first attempted to go there made the place closed to tourists for the rest of the afternoon). Here's a short clip of that morning (I can still remember how sleepy I was):


Now this place is overwhelming, the “grandness” (for a lack of a better term) is very in-your-face haha. And it was a hot day so just imagine how blinding everything is. It’s a good thing that the compound was huge enough to accommodate all of those tourists. 

We also watched the Siam Niramit show, which was recommended by my mother and is also offered by the travel agency we went to. The tickets were cheaper with the agency than with the published rates at the event site, so we were happy about that. The show was very entertaining and had all of these amazing effects, especially the river part. I was a bit bummed that there are no shows like these geared towards tourists (or none that I know of) in the Philippines. I think our history and culture is rich enough to merit a show just like this. Even Vietnam has its own water puppet show featuring their culture. 

Up Next: Travelling to Thailand Part 3: The Market and The Food