Cabbages and Condoms

I write to you from the free internet in Captain Condom's Lounge which is located in the restaurant Laura and I just patronized for a delicious dinner. This place was started to help fund family planning in rural Thailand and has apparently been a huge success. The food is very good Thai and the ambiance is nice (twinkly lights in a garden), albeit touristy. The decor is also predominantly condom themed: condom lanterns, fake people dressed in clothing made of condoms etc.

In other news, Bangkok has been pretty great so far. I would describe it as a hot, delicious, sparkling cacophony. The weather is (predictably) quite warm, and Yesterday and part of today we did a very standard tourist route and saw the Grand Palace, Wat Pho (home of a giant reclining Buddha), and Wat Arun. It's amazing how much sparkle seems to be a predominant decoration scheme in wats. Everything is painted gold and decorated with glass and things to catch the light so that whole buildings glitter. It almost hurts the eyes to look at them in the bright sun sometimes. Unfortunately it's hard to entirely capture the moment on film: both the intense sparkle and sweltering heat. After seeing dozens of Buddha's I think we started to feel a little bit of premature "temple fatigue," but we're going to have to gear up soon because we have many more to go on this trip!

Last night we had a nice Thai dinner with Ed (Laura's sisters best from college), but the real highlight was the very hip rooftop bar post-dinner. The most excitement we had today was probably in trying our first street food (delicious, hopefully we don't get sick) and getting ripped off by some cabbie. We asked him to take us to Siam Paragon, a swanky mall in a very central location, and instead he decided to take us to a "BTS" (skytrain) station that was on the other side of town. In his defense, he kept saying "BTS" and so we eventually got that he wanted to just drop us at a stop and then have us take the skytrain (which stops at Siam), but did we need to go in a huge loop and end up at the stop at the end of the line? I don't think so....everytime we tried to ask or question though he seemed to have no idea what we were saying and just kept repeating "BTS, BTS." In the end, we paid twice as much as we had earlier for the same ride, and then had to take the train, but luckily the grand cost ended up being like 5 dollars. Most everything here is ridiculously cheap, which brings me to my final event.

Thai massage. Amazing. Amazingly cheap. Laura and I each had a massage this afternoon and it was revolutionary. For 300 baht (about 10 dollars) we each got an hour-long massage. It was also very interesting because in a traditional Thai massage they have you put on satin pajamas and then massage you with their elbows and feet (in addition to hands) in a very physical manner. but it's great. we have decided that the new theme to our trip is a tour de massages....