Bangkok (December 15-20)

Bangkok is a fascinating city with friendly locals, lots to do, and many ancient ruins.  When we first arrived it was about 8pm and after getting SIM cards we went to grab a taxi.  We all piled our bags in the trunk of a four door taxi.  They were hanging out the back and only secured by one bungee cord, we just hoped that they wouldn't fall out.  Our apartment was great, although the beds were rock solid.  One thing that we noticed was that in all of the bathrooms there was a hose and a drain on the floor, this is because in Southeast Asia most restrooms do not have toilet paper (we stocked up on it in Australia).  The purpose of this is that you are supposed to spray your rear end when you are finished to clean it.  It's been affectionately dubbed "The bum gun," and because of this most restrooms are soaked when you walk in.  When we woke up at 12pm, we walked down the street to the supermarket, which had a bakery in it.  We each picked out doughnuts for about 5 cents each.  They were so cheap.  Sadly, the first thing that we did in Bangkok was look for a bus stop, this was because we were going to take a bus on Monday to Siem Reap in Cambodia.  All of the reviews said that the bus stop was hard to find and so we wanted to know where it was so that we didn't miss it last minute.  After finding the bus stop, we went to a movie theater to inquire if we could get tickets to Star Wars.  It turned out that the movie theater was in a mall and the mall turned out to be potentially the coolest mall ever.  Amazingly, it had tons of luxury and sports cars, it also had guitar shops, and a shop with hover boards that you could test. 

We were able to get tickets to Star Wars and booked that for Monday. 

     After the mall we went to the Asiatic Market, which was on the river front.  Here we had dinner at a fantastic Japanese restaurant.  It was delicious.  Afterwards, we went and looked at all of the different shops and looked for a foot massage.  The one we chose was no normal foot massage, our feet were massaged by fish called Doctor fish, they would eat all of the dead skin off of our feet.  This tickled a lot but was really fun. 

When we made it back to to the train station, we took the train back to the apartment.  Dad decided that since it would be faster, we should walk through the sketchy swamp which was inhabited by small huts.  We ended up making it back without any incidents but it was sketchy.  We then just went to bed for the night.  While we were in Bangkok Dad's feet were really bothering him and so he decided to try the Bangkok hospital and see if they could find anything out.  Finally, someone figured out what was going on, and it turned out that he has arthritis in his toes, elbows, and knees.  Most of the time in Bangkok he spent at the hospital. 

      On Monday we went to a place called Kidzania.  The whole point of Kidzania was that the adults were not allowed and the kids got to be adults.  It was an entire town with individual buildings, but it was all kids.  The staff gave us 50 kidzos (kids money) and we could either spend that money or keep it.  You could also make more money by doing different jobs, for example, my brother and I went to the sports stadium to play soccer, when the game was over we received 8 kidzos for playing.  There were also many other jobs including, photographer, musician, doctor, secret agent, gas station worker, McDonalds worker, and rock climber.  It was a great idea.  It was  geared toward slightly younger kids though.  After going to Kidzania we went and saw Star Wars in IMAX.  This was so cool and the movie was amazing, although I won't say anything for those of you who haven't watched it yet.  We also went to the temple, which was really cool, but crowded with tourists.  One of the buildings was covered in gold tile and another one had a budda made of jade inside of it.  Bangkok was a really cool city, riding public transportation was fun, it was awesome to see Star Wars, and the Asiatic market was fantastic.