bangkok part 1.5
Alright, don’t have much time here, so I’ll just mention a couple things.
All Watted out I’ve seen about 15 temples (Wats) in the last two days. I’ll all Wat-ted out. There were some very impressive ones.
How fucked up is this? A lot of the temples were in Ayuthaya. It’s the old capital about 60km north of Bangkok. I was taking the train to get there (I should note: 15 Baht, about 50 cents). (Also, the seats were wooden. And no A/C.) Not very far out of Bangkok the train stops. And stays stopped for about an hour. I thought it was an engine problem.
Eventually I got out and looked. The train had run over someone. Curiosity really did kill the cat this time as I didn’t feel very good after seeing the body under the train (and again after they’d cleared it to the side and we went past).
He got all Thai-ed up in the ropes I went to see some Thai boxing (Muay Thai). It was pretty cool. They punch, kick, knee, headlock and all sorts of stuff. Possibly more interesting was the very intricate and complicated set of hand signals people used up in the peanut gallery to denote how much and who they wanted to bet on. I saw a lot of money change hands. In a place where you can stay a night for 200 Baht (about $6.65) and eat lunch for 40 Baht (about $1.35), people were placing 1000 to 8K or 9K on single fights and there were 9 in the night. Pretty absurd.