Bangkok -> Cambodia

Disclaimer: This blog is written over a few days so multiple days are referred to Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

I officially arrived in Bangkok a few nights ago and it has been quite the experience. During the day when I first arrived I hung out with my friend Nats who I know from Berkeley, she took me around to a few of the malls, which were really nice and a lot fancier than a lot of the malls you would see in the West. That night I hung out with a few of my hostel roommates who were from England, their names being Steve and Emily. We ended up deciding to go to a bar called the sky bar, which is a nice but very expensive bar. The three of us, plus a girl from Holland whose name I can't remember, and Christian from Toronto all shared a taxis to get there. What is funny is the taxis driver drove us around for 45 minutes trying to take us to other bars, while the one we wanted to go to was only a 5 minute taxi ride away. It was a funny trip as half the people in the Taxi kept telling the taxi driver he wasn't going the right way, but he would continually say No No it's fine!

The next day I walked to the current palace of the King of Thailand and then after went to the Queens Park to read for a while. I met up with Nats again, and she took me to this mall that sales all different types of knock offs for next to nothing. If you wanted you could buy photo shop and microsoft office for ten dollars! After this we went with her sister and cousin to get hotpot, which is a dish where they serve you a boiling soup and you cook your own vegetables, meat, and fish inside of it. Later I headed back to the Hostel and met one of my new dorm mates Tom, who took the place of Christian who had flown out to Australia that morning. After talking to Tom for a while Tom, Emily, another Tom, Christian, a bunch of Germans, and myself all went out to Khao San Road to have a few beers, and see what the street was all about. It was crazy I think I was offered to go to a ping pong show about 5 or 6 times. I won't mention what a Thai Ping Pong show is on here, but you can look it up if you don't already know what it is. Warning it may be graphic!

The next day Tom my roommate, a girl we met from Oregon whose name is beyond me now, and myself all went to the more touristy part of Bangkok. We took a river taxi to get there which was quite a bit of fun. Once there we saw the Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, which is absolutely amazing in its size and there is no way for me to describe its beauty and massive presence, even in the pictures I took. After this we headed to the Grand Palace, on our way there we were told is was closed,from a guy who looked like an official telling us the Kings brother had just died, and instead tried to get us to go to a bunch of different "touristy" places on a tuk tuk. Everyone always talks about the scam artist in Thailand and to watch out for them, but it is surprising how good they really are. We didn't end up taking one of the scam tuk tuk rides, but we did believe him enough to put off going to the Grand Palace for a while. When we decided not to take the tuk tuk he tried to get pushy and tell us we should take it so we told him no and just walked away. After this Tom lost a bet to the girl from Oregon so we got to pick one thing that he had to eat. We went to a local market and found fermented hard boiled eggs that had a small chicken fetus in them and decided that is what he should eat. It was quite funny watching him eat it as he gagged and could hardly swallow the egg. I will admit that the smell was very off putting. After this we decided to go back to the Grand Palace and about two or three different people tried to scam us and tell us it was closed for some reason, so we should go to some other place where they wanted us to go on their tuk tuk. At this point it was pretty obvious so we decided to not listen and continue on to the Grand Palace. Once there the Palace was of course open and it was true that it was all a scam to get us to go somewhere else. We joked around saying that from now on we are only going to believe people in touristy areas if they are soldiers and have their rifles. Once we were inside Tom had to change into some borrowed pants as shorts are not allowed in the Grand Palace. It was amazing though, when they call it the Grand Palace they really mean it as it was absolutely breathtaking. After that we were kind of tired of being hassled by scam artists and we were pretty drained from the heat so we decided to head back to the hostel. That night we went to a nice restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms, which is a restaurant that gives you condoms instead of a mint after your dinner. All the flowers and lamp coverings in the restaurant are made out of condoms. The reason the owner made this restaurant is because unfortunately STD's have been rising significantly in Southeast Asia, and the owner wanted to help bring awareness to the problem and try and make safe sex education fun at the same time. The food was absolutely amazing and it was an extremely nice looking restaurant. One might think that the condoms would make it look cheesy, but they really helped add to the restaurant.

The next day Tom my roommate left for Southern Thailand, and Emily, the other Tom, Nate a law student from Kentucky, Anissa, and myself all went to the weekend outdoor market in Bangkok. It is the largest outdoor market in the world and has over 10,000 stalls, it is massively huge and you can find extremely good deals. Tom, Nate, and I separated from the girls for a while and we all got lost while looking for somewhere to sit down. What is funny about it is we looked for 45 minutes without realizing that we all thought we were looking for something different. Tom thought we were looking to find the place where we ate, Nate thought we were looking for a shop we had seen earlier, and I thought we were looking for a place to have a coke. It took us 45 minutes to realize this even though we were all giving each other counterproductive advice, it was pretty funny. After we went out to the sky bar that evening in downtown Bangkok, this is where they filmed one of the scenes for Hangover II. It was an absolutely gorgeous view as you could see all of downtown Bangkok in the horizon. It was pretty expensive with the drinks costing 470 Thai Baht which is around 15 dollars a piece, but it was an amazing experience and I'm glad we went.
On Sunday we took it easy, went out to dinner and after came back to play some card games. Since most of us were leaving early Monday morning, "4:30" AM, we all decided to go to bed early, but since it was our last night together that didn't happen and of course we all only got half an hour of sleep.
Today the 8th Tom and I went down to the train station to catch a train to the Cambodian border. The train seats were pretty uncomfortable and it was a pretty long ride at 5.5 hours, but the view was stunning. We passed rice patties and dense shrub areas on our way to the border. Tom got a good laugh when I had just woken up from my nap, because I was eating a bag of chips and I had just noticed that a dead dragonfly was laying on my wrist, which I will unfortunately admit startled me. It caused me to throw my bag of chips accidentally onto a Cambodian man sitting next to me. I apologized, but he didn't seem too upset about it as he also found it slightly funny. Once we got to the border our day turned into quite the adventure, first instead of taking us to the border our Tuk Tuk driver took us to a "Cambodian Consulate" that was a block away from the actual border and dropped us off telling us this is where we needed to buy our 40 dollar visas, when in reality at the border, which is a block away, they only cost 20 dollars. So we told the men there we refused to buy our visas from them and would walk the rest of the way to the border. Immigration was more or less uneventful besides an official who required me to pay an extra 100 baht "3ish dollars" for my visa or he wouldn't approve it, which I begrudgingly did. Once we got out of immigration there was the usual rush of cab and bus drivers trying to get you to use their vehicles. We had heard that if you left the immigration point and walked down the main street you could find taxis for cheaper then the ones right outside the post. I had also heard that although this is true the taxis drivers in front of the immigration exit will follow you and will hassle non-commissioned drivers if they try to pick you up and this what happened to us. As we were walking down the street a cab driver kept following us for half an hour or so telling us he would offer us the best price, but we told him no we would find our own way. Despite this he continued to follow us until another taxis pulled over to pick us up, since this driver wasn't commissioned, the driver who had been following us told him he would tell the police and have him arrested. So our driver told us to hurry and get in so we could go, and just to mention all taxis in Cambodia are unmarked so it's difficult to distinguish them. Once we were driving we found out our driver was going a different direction so he called his brother to have him drive us to Siem Reap. He had him meet us on a backstreet in a town that neither of us had heard of. This started to make Tom and I uneasy, but what happened next really unnerved us. Once the new driver was driving us he pulled over to the side of the road where him and his friend got out of the car and told us to wait one minute, while at the same time a whole bunch of Cambodian men were surrounding the car and rubbing the trunk of the car, which is where our bags were. After this they all walked maybe two car lengths down the road and at this point I told Tom I wasn't going to stay in the car. So I got out and asked them what was going on and this wasn't part of the plan. After which Tom got out of the car and demanded them to open the trunk to give us our bags, which they did. At this point a lady pulled up on a motorcycle and got into the front passenger seat at which point the driver said lets go. At this point we made him tell us there wouldn't be anymore stops, as we didn't have much of a choice as we were in the middle of who knows where and didn't have any other means of transportation. At this point in the car Tom and I were on nerves the rest of the ride and a monsoon storm came in so we could no longer see the road. The trip lasted like this for another hour or so and then we finally arrived in Siem Reap and he dropped us off. Despite all of this we still got a 3 hour taxi ride for 30 US dollars, not bad. Later we decided to go out and get some food. While we were eating we were finally relaxing for the first time the whole day. At that point we started to hear explosions down the street. In turns out a building that stored propane about a block and a half away caught on fire and all of the propane began exploding. Since Siem Reap doesn't have their own fire department people began throwing water bottles at the fire in order to put it out and then became makeshift firefighters by going into the building and climbing up ladders to help stop the fire. While this was happening a semi-toxic cloud began forming over the fire and the police forced everyone to leave, at the same point a fire department from another city finally arrived around 45 minutes late. It was a very crazy day, but the kind of day that distinguishes a backpacking trip and once are in the past are the kind of stories that make for a good telling. Cambodia is a beautiful country as it is lush and green absolutely every where. Tomorrow we are heading to Angkor Wat, and I will also post some pictures of Bangkok and Thailand tomorrow once I have uploaded them to my computer. I didn't get a whole lot of photos of our adventure through Cambodia sadly, as at the time I was worried that bringing out a nice camera might not make the situation any better. Well that is it for now! I'll check in later and sorry it has been so long since the last update. Oh and also the currency situation is an interesting mix in Cambodia, they use dollars and Cambodian Rial interchangeably. For example if you have dinner that costs 2.50 and you pay with 5 dollars, they will give you back 2 US dollars and a 2000 Rial bill as this is equal to 50 cents, very interesting!