Soi Cowboy!

After an uneventful and long flight from Vancouver, we arrived in Thailand early on Saturday morning. Our room here at the hotel did not disappoint us when we finally got here at about 2 am. We crashed pretty hard and when we woke up we enjoyed our free breakfast buffet before heading up to the roof to check out the roof top current pools and fitness room. We knew it was time to head back down to our room when we heard the thunder crack overhead. The rain started soon afterwards and it was intense. We waited until it had started to diminish and then headed out to check out the neighborhood that we are in. A snack of sticky rice and black bean cooked in a banana leaf refueled us a little, but we still ended up napping when we got back to our room. It seems that the 13 hour time difference is a little tricky to get used to.

After the nap we decided to go for another little walk around and discovered a mini red light district a couple blocks away from the hotel called Soi Cowboy. Neon signs and bars cover the whole strip, with bars offering services that require signs such as "We have 20 gorgeous girls, some ugly ones and some fat ones too" and "We have more ladies that you can handle".

On the way back up to our room we talked with our amazingly friendly concierge and he arranged for us to get a ride out to the floating market the next day. We tried to get some sleep to prepare for our early morning trip but we (especially Ryan) were unsuccessful and didn't get as much shut eye as we would have liked.

We were both awake before our wake up call came and got ready to leave early as it is a 1.5 hour car ride out to the floating market. Once we arrived we hopped onto a long tail boat and headed out to see what the market had to offer. Since this is generally a tourist market it was mostly souvenirs, spices, Buddha statues and other little trinkets. The salespeople were a little pushy but friendly and I love the way they would grab the boat with a long hook on a pole and drag you over to their stall. We ended up getting a couple little items and learned to barter in the process. It was scorching hot so we bought our boat driver a pop while we chugged our water.

About half way into the ride we pulled over to a beautiful little wat and got out to take a look around. It was stunning! It was surrounded by bells that you bang with little wooden sticks that they leave in buckets for that purpose. I couldn't resist and had to make some noise myself.

On the way up to the wat we noticed the water thrashing around. We realized then that the water was teeming with large silver fish. Our driver grabbed us a bag of fish food and we fed the fish from the boat and then from the dock at the wat. Quite an experience. Then it was back to the hotel to grab some rays at the roof top pool and find ourselves some dinner. Tomorrow the new year's (Songkran) festivities start, although it seems like the water fight had already started by the time we returned to Bangkok. Time to get prepared with our water guns.