Bangkok

Let me start by saying Bangkok is not Thailand, if Thailand was a house , Bangkok is the garbage disposal. Sure there are nice things about the garbage disposal, it takes care of waste and turns it into something managable, and even the occaisional lemon rind smells nice but all in all Bangkok is a bad place to judge the rest of Thailand by.
By the time Melissa and I got to our guesthouse, it was about 3:00 am and I was energized and ready to explore. I dropped my stuff off at the guest house we were staying in and set off to check out the nearby area of Khao San Rd, which is the backpacker's district of Bangkok. Now Khao San at 4am is a very different place than Khao San during the day. The street was pretty devoid of people and the people that were there were mostly drunk tourists or locals soliciting to 'love you long time' still not sure what that means ;) and still not which were all girls... After walking around and suffering paralysis from the extreme culture shock, we headed to our sleeping arangements for the evening. Our Guest house was a very nice, with a huge bed and our own bathroom, and a lack of other living animals -good news. The next morning was a huge difference from the night before, everyone walking around was happy and very friendly, I left early to find an ATM to make sure that my debit card didn't work before calling the bank- to my supprise I was able to withdraw 10,000 baht with no problems. The area we were in reminded me of Mexican walking markets, most vendors had karts and some of the larger store fronts had pull out karts with various items: wallets, shirts, massages, pirated music and DVDs, Doctorate degrees, Passports, etc. Thai people love their 7-11's and for good reason, they provide what has been the best air conditioning in the country, we have already stopped in several just to enjoy the air conditioning. We walked around the area figuring out what to do first, after eating some amazing curry and soup for about $.50 each, and visiting several 7-11s, we decided to get a half hour foot message for about 4 bucks. After food and foot massages we traveled to Wat Pho on the water taxi. The water taxi turned out to be a great way to see different parts of the city pretty quickly, we got distracted watching the sights and missed our stop. We found the second best air conditioned building which had all sorts of antiques that probably should have been in some sort of museum. After finding our way to Wat Pho and seeing the huge reclining buddah, we hopped back on to the water taxi and headed to a restaraunt Melissa had checked out the day before. It had a huge water fall in the courtyard and BBQ fish that had probably eaten its last meal right before we ate it. we hurried back to the guest house to grab our bags and headed toward the train station. Melissa, being pretty Bangkok savvy, was on top of the taxi scammers and insisted on taking a taxi who ran a meter. Several taxis actually did not agree to run the meter, and were offering 100 - 200 baht for a trip that costed us 58 baht using the meter. Props to Melissa! She had purchased our first class ticket to Chiang Mai the day before, we boarded the train at 7:30 and were both exhausted and ready to pass out in our cabin for the 15 hour trip north.