This is the third installment of excerpts from the travel diary I kept during my trip to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in 1999. The previous posts covered Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Present day thoughts are in italics — after Penang I didn’t keep up with my journal very well, so the remaining posts will be mostly annotations.

Bangkok

Bangkok is full of amazing temples – it often seems like there is one on every other block. The Grand Palace was also amazing and truly spectacular. It is huge and covered in gold. Other than that though, Bangkok wasn’t too interesting. It is dirty, full of smog, and has terrible traffic. We went on a boat tour mainly through the outskirts of the city. The guide was an interesting lively guy, but he kept us how extremely happy and content the people that lived in little shacks along the river were, which seemed a bit of an exaggeration. They let us off at a snake farm where we saw an impressive show. Men grabbing poisonous snakes with their mouths, stuff like that.

I may not have liked Bangkok too much because I got sick during our first or second day there. Having an upset stomach while in the country with the greatest food in the world is a terrible misfortune, so I can’t have been too happy.

It was neat to explore the ancient buddhist temples and imagine what the lives’ of their safron robed monks were like. Many of the monks were very young – barely teenagers. It is common in Thailand for kids to spend a few years at a temple. How would that experience change the life of an American teen?

The Grand Palace was an incredible place. Since this trip I’ve been to a number of European royal palaces, and while they are obviously majestic in their own right, none have the level of detail exhibited by the exquisite carvings and statues everywhere on the palace grounds. Not to mention the fact that literally everything seemed to be covered in gold.