Bangkok: Mar 17: The Royal Barges Museum and other adventures

I had grand plans for Wednesday. I didn't get to do most of them, and some things I did get to do weren't good, but some places Di Yin and I found by accident were.

As always, I took pictures, though nowhere near as many as usual. Di Yin took many more, often of different things. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #279). When you see a picture captioned "our view from the hotel the morning we left Bangkok" (picture #385), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

After taking our hotel's ferry across the river, Di Yin and I began the day by wandering through some streets and markets at random. This area was definitely part of the city, though it can't be said to be central. After an hour or so, we located a pier and headed north, disembarking near the Grand Palace. Di Yin wanted to buy me a hat we spotted yesterday. We also took the time to grab a meal. After lunch, while we were still walking around this area, a crazily intense rain arrived. Luckily, most of the street carts have umbrellas; we huddled under a spot where a few overlapped. The rain left fairly quickly -- it couldn't keep up its incredible pace for long!

Next, we began our quest to find the Royal Barges Museum, housing (you guessed it) the barges used by the royal family. It's most accessible via boat, but we decided not to hire an expensive boat taxi ("longboat") and instead took the public ferry to the pier closest to the museum and figured we could find our way there on foot.

The museum is on the opposite side of the river from Bangkok proper and from most of the tourist attractions. The district's known as Thonburi. Disembarking at the Wang Lang Pier, we found ourselves in an area nearly entirely populated by locals and in by far the greatest street food market we'd seen yet (and would see) in Bangkok. There were blocks upon blocks of carts and vendors. Even though we just had lunch ( :( ), we nevertheless often stopped and watched and even found stomach space to buy some items to eat then or later. Streets branching off from this main food street (leading to the pier) sold clothes and the like. We wandered down some of these streets too.

Proceeding onward but lacking a good map, we had trouble finding the Royal Barges Museum. We attempted to ask people to no avail. I'm not sure whether this was a language issue or a lack of knowledge. Happily, we ran into a French student studying in Bangkok who knew where the museum is. He walked with us most of the way there (the route was on his way home), and we talked about how he ended up in Bangkok and where he was before. He was a really nice guy.

He pointed out the sign for the museum. (He hadn't been before but had seen the sign.) He left us. From the main sign on the road, the museum was harder to find than the Shanghai Propaganda Museum, which was pretty hard to find and I found last summer. We followed arrows, heading down dirty paths sometimes alongside garbage piles or canals with stagnant water. Ugh.

The museum wasn't exciting. (I was going to preface the sentence with "worse yet", but even if the museum didn't exist, it wouldn't have been worse than the walk.)

After the museum, we followed the same path out of the ill-maintained neighborhood to the road, walked along the road to and through the giant street market to the ferry pier, and headed home to our hotel (via a cross-river ferry to a river ferry to our cross-river hotel ferry).

Near dinnertime, we ventured out into the heat and headed to Silom Complex. Di Yin and I showed her parents the food festival we found on Monday. Her parents (well really her dad) went crazy, buying bags and bags of snacks (mostly Chinese), mostly to bring home. I tried a bunch of the items they bought: freshly-cooked squid (spicy and good), fresh guava juice (good, like a funky apple), seaweed sushi (fine), dried fish (meh / not as good as the kind I get in Shanghai), dried crab (decent/good). I also, after much language confusion, got a mini-sausage to try, but found it dry. (The language confusion was because the woman sold the mini-sausages in large bags by weight. I only wanted one to try. After she finally understood, she just gave me one for free.) Also in the mall, we wandered into a supermarket wherein I spotted a dozen different types of mangoes. I knew there were a few varieties, but didn't know there were that many.

Di Yin's parents went to one of the mall's restaurants for dinner. I still wanted more street food, so I headed out, following a tip, and walked the handful of blocks to Soi Convent (Convent Street). Di Yin decided to follow me. The experience of walking down a street with cheap street food-carts outside comparatively expensive sit-down restaurants makes one think. Details of what we ate are in the pictures.