Grand Palace and Wat Pho

Hello everyone! I'm sorry I haven't been updating on Bangkok more, things just got busy this week! I am off to one more adventure this afternoon - a weekend home stay and service project in a remote Karen village. Karen are an important ethnic group to the struggle in Burma, but this is a Thai Karen group. I'm really excited!

Anyway, we arrived in Bangkok late Monday night so our sightseeing didn't start until Tuesday morning, but we started off big with a tour of the Grand Palace. The current royal family doesn't really reside there much (seeing as the king and queen are quite elderly) but it was still magnificent to see.

I was particularly impressed with this golden chedi, which is a common sight in Thailand except this one was covered in a tiny gold tile mosaic from Italy.

As we continued on the tour, I saw a familiar sight in the form of a model of Angkor Wat! One of the former kings had wanted to show the prestige of the kingdom of Siam (modern day Thailand) over the neighboring Khmer kingdom in Cambodia. He wanted to go and bring Angkor Wat to Siam, which would have been expensive and difficult, so I guess he had to be satisfied with this model.

One of the main attractions of the Grand Palace is the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which I unfortunately was not allowed to take pictures of. However, I thought that the mural surrounding the temple was equally fantastic, as it was gold-leafed and depicting scenes from the famous Hindu story of the Ramayana.

I was also impressed by the beautiful garden areas of the palace. We had a nice break here to take pictures and explore a little before heading off to another temple, Wat Pho.

Wat Pho is home to the enormous reclining Buddha, the posture he takes just before his death. It was very crowded but I managed to snap a few pictures, despite my camera battery dying a little bit!

I thought the chedis at Wat Pho were beautiful too, covered in intricate, detailed floral designs. 

After Wat Pho, we had lunch at a small restaurant on the riverside and then relaxed in a nearby park where we saw a giant prehistoric-looking lizard crawl into the water! It disappeared before I could get a picture, but it was a crazy sight to see. We had the afternoon off with the option of going to a shopping area. A couple of my friends and I went and checked out the upscale malls before doing some shopping in a maze-like area of market stalls in one of the malls. We topped it off with a pizza dinner and then headed back to the hotel to rest up for the next busy day.