One Night in Bangkok

warning- shift key is dodgy on this computer. also, bravo google for automatically logging me in when i went from gmail to blogger. though it is curious that all my directions are in thai. do language preferences not translate? i say it's a 50/50 shot i choose publish instead of discard from the squigglies at the bottom of my screen. after two years, you'd think i'd know which was which without reading.

so i'm in bangkok. it took me 20 hours to get here, not including the drive to lax. the flight to tokyo was 11 hours, and yet united gives you communal movie screens instead of in seat ones. bush league, united. and that airline's conspiracy to force me to watch bridge to terabithia finally succeeded; i remember the kid dying as one the traumatic incidents from when they did a version of this story on wonderworks on pbs, i really didn't need to see it again. also, shooter? really bad film. on my flight, i had a really smelly man next to me. he had ferocious bo, and his breath was worse. the breath was great because his buddy was sitting in the middle seat directly behind him, so he kept turning around to talk to him, hitting me with a warm blast of aroma each time. when they gave us hot towels, he scrubbed down his face and neck, which makes sense because it was probably the closest he'd come to bathing in some time. but then the older, overweight, visibly crazy guy across the aisle in the center of the five person row went into the restroom and emerged sans shirt and proceeded to alternately sit back down and wander around the plane topless for about an hour. so it turns out i did not have the worst seatmate on the plane.

i got in late last night and met my friend laura at our hotel. we got up at the crack of dawn and did a crash course in bangkok touring. we saw the grand palace where the royal family lives and there are lots of crazy statues; we saw the golden buddha which was covered with plaster to hide it from invading armies and then the knowledge that it was solid gold was lost until oops someone cracked it and guess what, solid gold underneath; the emerald buddha which is actually made of jade; and the reclining buddha, which is really huge. we then took a boat to a monorail to the subway to our hotel, and are departing in 30 minutes for a holiday in cambodia. we saw a mini model of angor wat at the grand palace and so are really psyched.

that's it! no pictures because i can't upload them to this computer. there's a chance they'll all come at the end. sorry!