Getting scammed and cashmere in Bangkok

I was in Bangkok, Thailand for about 2 days and have such mixed feelings, how to begin... First of all, I LOVE the food!!! Everywhere you go there are vendors on the streets selling food so there's a constant mix of fabulous aromas in the air that make your mouth water all the time. Ah, wonderful. But, in the "Land of Smiles" I saw maybe one, and it was on Jeff's face... Here are the major things that we did:

-Visited the standing Buddah (Wat Ni) and the reclining Buddah (Wat Pho). Both are absolutely breathtaking by their size. They are both at least 30 meters tall (or long, for the reclining one) and are gold plated. You could probably fit inside thier earlobes, that's how big they are! Very fun to see.

-Went to the Grand Palace of the King where you can see architectural influences from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, China and England (and probably more...). Everything was massive and incredibly shiny. Some buildings were beautiful and some were borderline tacky, yet still fun to look at. We spent a few hours here and could have stayed longer if we didn't feel we were about to pass out by heat stroke.

-We met a fellow traveller (who we now believe to be part of a scam to get us to certain businesses, long story) who recommended us go to the Armani export agency to get a suit. We went "just to look" and both ended up ordering hand tailored cashmere suits. The material was good quality (he burned it for us to prove it) and we think we got a fairly good deal. But still, there goes my budget...

-Visited a travel agency recommended by the fellow "traveller" and spent WAY too much money on a package deal to Cambodia... Blast! Hopefully the bus actually comes to pick us up and take us to Cambodia...

-Caught a river taxi down the river for sunset. We weren't exactly sure where it would stop and ended up missing our exit, but because of this we found a great restaurant (called "In Love" -very Thai indeed) overlooking the river and the Bangkok bridge to catch the last minutes of the sunset. Fabulous!

-Hopped into a tuk tuk and asked him to take us to a shop. He said he'd take us if we wouldn't mind going to one of his shops afterwards. It was the end of the day and we thought we'd see where he'd take us so we agreed. After our shop and his shop (which was a jewelry shop that was probably selling fake stones for way too much) we told him we wanted to go to our hotel, but he ended up taking us to THREE MORE of his places first... We yelled at him alot and made it known that he was NOT a good person and was a liar.

After these two days we were excited about moving on to Cambodia. Hopefully the bus will show up...

Aug 26, 2009

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