Arriving in this HUGE city, we headed for our hotel. Knowing that life here is very inexpensive, we decided to relax and get a short back massage, $6.80 later we headed to dinner to plan out the rest of our trip. The cool thing about the season right now is the HEAVY downpours and thunderstorms that roll in every afternoon. So the next day we awoke at 6:30am and after a buffet breakfast at our hotel, we headed out to the river, near the historic area of Bangkok. This country is a bit different, people here live very modest lives, yet it took us a little while to get used to the life. With markets on almost every street, and vendors everywhere, we started seeing how "normal" life is. It was fun to stop and ask what food was what, but until we took the cooking class later and had the tour of the markets and the history and the story behind the scenes, most of the cool details would be unknown by the average tourist.

Here pictured is the view of our pool, and then the view of the city from the top of out hotel. Its a massive concrete jungle down there.

Then as we head to the center of town, this is the river tour we took. Once called the "Venice of the East" This was a clean beautiful River with Canals and waterways, but as more and more commercial businesses came and the population boomed, the water became more and more polluted, so much so now, that no water or fish are used from the river. Its just a transportation system.

As you can see here, such is life here. Its so peaceful and simple back here in these canals. Floating markets are here where vendors fill up their boats with goods and wares and trade in the canals. Its quite a cool site. Although Bangkok used to have many more canals, a lot were filled in during the 60-70's so that they could trade goods on dry land. From what I understand, more than 40% of the city is reclaimed wetlands filled in over the years.

We had a leisurely time the next day exploring the markets, historical sites and museums with ancient art from 1300 and before. There was one museum shop where you could buy furniture from Thailand and China that was 100-400 years old. Called the Lek Gallery, it was so cool!

The next day we went to cooking school and this was amazing. I think the tour through the markets, and the explaining of what was what, made everything seem more real. The foreign fruits and veggies, fish, deserts, (these don't look like deserts, but are darn good!). Everything looked dirty and chaotic before "Breeze" our chef took us on the tour. From what i learned the markets open at 1-2am and are bustling at 3-4am, this is when the food(veggies, fish, bread, etc...) is bought for all the Tourist restaurants, hotels, and the fresh flowers for the decoration can be picked up here for super cheap. By 9am when we arrived to check out the stalls, most everything was picked over, and by 11am, they are shutting down, closing up for the day. What a different way of life compared to how we do things back in the states.

So upon taking the train back to the "Blue Elephant", we started cleaning up and preparing for our 4 dishes we were about to make. We made a Curry dish, Salmon Soup, Papaya Chicken Salad, and a Prawn & veggie stir fry. Then we got to enjoy eating them afterwards for lunch! To top everything off, we were served mango & stickrice! Wow, this was an amazing dessert. I think the cooking school opened up our eyes to more of the culture, food, and made it easy to learn how to cook Thai. We can't wait to get back home and try more of these recipes from scratch! If you like Thai, then we'll have to have some of you over, shoot us a comment here and we'll shoot an invite back!

Today we are in Singapore and we have the whole day set for a bunch of cool stuff. Here is the shot from our 36th floor view of the Harbor. Singapore is the closest to Honolulu as I can think of. Beautiful, clean and full of culture and warm sunshine...