Journey to Thailand and Day 1 in Bangkok

On the morning of June 27th, my parents dropped me and Kathryn Ann off at Charlotte Douglas Airport.  We connected through Los Angeles and Seoul, Korea on our way to Bangkok.  After 22 hours of flights and 8 hours of layovers, we arrived in Bangkok and took a taxi to the apartment where we stayed.  At this point, it was after midnight and we went to sleep immediately.

In the morning we got up around 10 and got omelets and rice for breakfast.  Then we took the BTS Skytrain to Chatuchak weekend market.  We wandered around there for several hours.  Highlights included a merchant selling sting ray leather, the hand chair shown below, some cool art, and a large animal section with many different kinds of fish, puppies, kittens, rodents, and birds.  Kathryn Ann had some fried quail eggs.  They tasted a lot like chicken eggs.

We went back to the apartment and took a 4 hour nap.  Then we went to dinner at a restaurant on our street. I had pork with basil and chilles.  KA ordered seafood with rice. It turned out to be octopus and shrimp, neither of which she had ever eaten.  Then we took a cab to Khao San road, a street famous for hostels and backpacker bars.  After walking around for a while and drinking a beer, we walked to a reggae bar.  This bar featured a lot of Thai men with dreadlocks, including a 2 man band singing Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff covers.  Our waitress, a former waiter, was trying to fit as many patrons into the bar as possible.  She sat us at a table with a British man and his girlfriend for hire.  When they left, a group of Scottish guys sat down with us and we played Jenga for a while.  We enjoyed the company and music.  Then we took a cab home and rested up for our next day.

Introduction

"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more." - Pico Iyer, Why We Travel

Thursday we leave for a 6 week sebatical/adventure around Asia. We are excited for this opertunity and will sharing some of these stories on our blog. Enjoy!