Our third day in Bangkok was a national holiday, so entrance to the Grand Palace was free! Though we had to let the King go first. Seemed like a fair trade.
The Grand palace complex is home to the Emerald Buddha, which is carved out of Jade, just to confuse you. Anyway, it's carved from a single piece of Jade, and having seen the huge reclining Buddha the day before I was expecting something pretty spectacular from the even more famous Emerald one. It was mildly disappointing, but sadly, because you can't take photos in the room, I do not have much evidence of this with which to convince you. It's about 45cm tall and, though it may well be a beautiful Jade statue, it's covered in different gold outfits most of th year and surrounded by much taller, much gaudier gold Buddhas that really distract from it.
In the afternoon we went to Chatachuk market, which was awesome. Everything you could think of was for sale. The food was great, lots of fresh cooked stuff that took just a couple of minutes to prepare before you were off on your way again. My favourite was the happy buns, which are little dumplings stuffed with meat or seafood that have smiley faces on them.
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4 comments:
I looked up on Google the "Emerald Buddha" and it seems as if you have described exactly what you will see. I little green man dressed in gold surrounded by gold. It was interesting though and lurved you post and vacation pix's once again!
Yeah, it was a little strange, I'm probably making a massive ignorant foreigner faux pas and there's good reasons for the different gold outfits, but if the most striking thing about something is its green-ness, then show it off.
Hey, my friend Christine is over there right now too. Have you seen her? She's got light brown hair, super cute, stands about 5'6". Say hi to her for me!
Must have missed her, sorry.
We actually got back from Thailand a couple of months ago. I'm just crap at posting my blog entries in a timely fashion.
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