I woke up pretty early and downloaded photos in the morning. Breakfast at Suk11 was toast with thai tea butter (this s*** is the bomb!), sweet rice w/condensed milk, jelly w/sweet beans, and fruit. We took the BTS Skytrain to the river, then rode the Chao Phraya Tourist Boat upriver to head to Wat Po. There were several stops along the way, dropping people off and picking them up.

Once we reached our stop, we jumped off and weaved through a small market of dried fish, trinkets, and thai herbal remedies, and stopped for fried bananas and the mother fruit of them all, DURIAN. If you’ve never heard of durian before, lets just say it’s actually banned in some hotels (including our hostel) because some people, even Thais, find the stench it omits to be offensive. David was so excited and I must say I was too! I’ve never tried it fresh. We paid 20 baht for one piece. I was a little worried, but all in all it wasn’t that bad! David actually liked it a lot. It’s only that half-second right before you take that first bite when you get a whiff of that musky, rotten, hot garbage smell. Then you take a big, custardy bite and it all goes away and turns into this sweet creamy mush. Yum.

We finally got to Wat Po, and saw yet more amazingness….highlights which include the gold-leafed Reclining Buddha, which I believe is the biggest indoor one in the world. We donated money and gave alms (dropped one coin each in about 60 pots) and wrote prayers on new roof tiles to replace old ones. Seems like the Wats are in a constant state of maintenance, and it was nice to know that our names, and hundreds of others, will somehow be a part of the structures for many years.

We ate, bought postcards, and headed back to the boat when it started POURING rain. It rained sideways! Everyone was completely soaked. So needless to say, the rainy season came early this year.

We packed our stuff back at Suk11 and went to the train station to catch the overnighter north to Chiang Mai. Once in the station, everyone was going their own way, minding their own business when suddenly the guards rang their whistles and hundreds of people stopped dead in their tracks and stood still. It was weird, kinda the flash mob thing, but different. The only stragglers left walking were the other tourists, looking around confused as always. The huge LCD screen on one of the walls lit up and the national anthem started playing while everyone saluted images of the King. After the song was over, the screen turned returned to regular Thai commercials, someone hit the action button and the train station returned to its normal hustling and bustling like nothing happened. Apparently this happens once every Sunday, at 6pm sharp. We were lucky to have been in a crowded train station when it happened. What a sight to see!

The exhaust, noise, and movement on the train kept me up the early part of the night, but once I got used to it, it was more of like someone rocking me to sleep. The bunks are really cool. During the day, the seats face each other, like a little booth, then at night, the train attendant slides the seats and transform them into a lower and upper bunk. I took the upper bunk, of course (so fun!) It was fine except for the loud French people who stayed up playing cards and drinking really bad vodka.