Sawadee Kha (hello)

After a crazy crazy week in the bustling city of Bangkok we are really looking forward to heading down south to the chilled out islands around Ko Pi Pi (where they filmed the Beach). Whilst in Bangkok we visited the Grand Palace Temple, shopped round the crazy markets, held on tight to mad tuk tuks and seen some Thai kickboxing.

One night we caught a tuktuk to the stadium closeby to see our first Thai kick boxing fights. The whole experience was amazing, from dashing through the traffic on the tuktuk to trying to buy our tickets. All in all, we saw 6 fights and two of those ended in one boxer being carried off on stretchers, brilliant!





The markets are absolutely brilliant, so cheap its hard not to get too carried away. The best bit about shopping around the streets is the haggling. They often say a high price like 250 baht (about 3.50) and you start to haggle over 50 or 100 baht like its a huge discount, but then you realise its probably only 20p you're arguing over! Plus you can eat pad thai from street vendors for 20 bhat (about 14p)







The Thai people are really friendly and enjoying having a laugh around with the backpackers. It's great to hear them chatting away in Thai and then coming out with some real Eastenders phrases.





You also have to cope with the constant barrage of 'you want tuk tuk' 'you want suit-make you very nice shirt' 'thai massage mister' 'hey man! where you go?' and if you stop to look at a map, your asking for trouble. Someone else always knows somewhere else you should go 'you see my friend, he do you good deal!'



As you would expect, there are loads of temples in and around bangkok, we took a trip to the grand place to see the emerald budda, but there was some kind of ceremony going on, so we could only peer in through the door and have a quick look, but the rest of the palace is amazing-the thais sure love their gold leaf!





Yesterday we took a trip down the river, and went to one of the massive shopping malls at siam square, and then tried to go to chinatown-which was easier said than done, at first the tuktuk did know where we wanted to go, then he didn't, and then took us completely round the houses to somewhere that turned out to be nowhere near chinatown. So a long walk later we finally got there, and as dawn concisely put it 'it looked a lot like Thai town!' So we walked a bit more and caught the ferry back home! The girls then had a nap, and we went out on the town...