King Cobras, Thai Haircuts, Boats, and Water on the Rocks.
Dear Wilson
So I know the title of this blog is confusing. That was on purpose just to make you curious. Gotta keep my readers interested 😉. So we went to a snake show yesterday. $20 USD and the whole family got to see a show with cobras less than 10' from where we were sitting in this tiny set of concrete bleachers. We got there early so we got the front row! The King Cobra was about 8' long and it was pretty awesome to watch up close along with the other cobras and poisonous snakes they brought out.
After the show we took about a 10 minute walk to head to the BTS station (their above ground tram). On our way, we saw a hair salon. Brandt knew he really needed a haircut but the idea of going into a Thai hair salon seemed to terrify him. Well, he was shit out of luck because his former and favorite hair stylist, Kacie, is on the other side of the planet. 🤣 Guess who got a Thai haircut? Yeah, Brandt did! He had to realize in Thailand you get Thai haircuts. I guess in his mind he would eventually find a super sweet white girl named Sally. Or maybe he thought Kacie would eventually fly in to give him a cut lol. Instead he got… well we don't know her name because they don't even use our alphabet so it's not like we can "sound it out". After the haircut and a Starbucks (yes we got our boujee coffee), we continued our walk to the BTS.
Once we exited the BTS, the river Taxi was only about a 3 minute walk. Most people take a taxi to get somewhere. However, we pretty much took the water taxi just to ride upriver for the hell of it. We had high hopes for this scenic ride. One problem… The river is very choppy and we didn't make it 10 minutes on that damn boat without Erica, Cali, Chloe, and I to start feeling sea sick. The plan was to ride up river for about 30 minutes and get off at a port that was known for traditional Thai Longboat tours. The taxis are very large boats that hold a few hundred people at a time. The Longboats were for somewhere around 15-20 people. We knew that if we were already sea sick from the big boats in 10 minutes, we would be totally fucked on a tiny boat for a 2 hour tour. So we got off of the taxi about 4 exits early and had literally no idea where we were. One of my favorite things to do is just pop up in a random spot not knowing what to expect, so it worked out 😀.
The 5 of us walked down some very impoverished streets. You start to feel bad for the true locals in this area. The income level of the people surrounding us was probably around $100 - $300 USD per month if that much. In most countries, going through the bad area of the city would be deemed as dangerous or at least a little sketchy. In a 95% Buddhist country like Thailand, we truly feel pretty safe even in the poor areas. Please don't confuse "feeling safe" with comfortable, because we are definitely way out of our comfort zone in places like this. We always feel extremely out of place and we know we get looked at. I will say that most Thai people smile and show happiness when they see us. Not like a judging stare like we got in Central America. They do call Thailand "the land of smiles". I now see that it is accurate. We just randomly meandered the streets and alleyways until we stumbled upon a lively market area. It's pretty crazy how almost anywhere you walk in Bangkok eventually turns into a huge outdoor market at some point. After looking later on gps, we realized we had walked into the Chinatown area of Bangkok. Never know what you will find when walking. That's why it's still my favorite form of transportation in foreign countries. Fast transportation always misses that potential local surprise of cultural sights. It's truly fascinating to see the local people go about their daily grind. We continued to walk for hours through a seemingly endless flow of shops and stalls. After that, we got a taxi and headed back to the Airbnb for the evening.
When we got home, I went to the convenience store to grab some beer. This was now my 5th attempt to buy beer. Thailand has very funny rules on alcohol purchases. They only sell alcohol from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm - midnight. My first 3 attempted days, I went to the stores at the wrong time of day. In the last 2 days I was basically 100% sure I would be able to buy beer. Attempt #4 (which was yesterday) happened to be a Buddhist holiday so no beer sales yesterday. Today I was even more confident I could buy beer. Since yesterday was a Buddhist holiday and I went at 1:00 today, I could surely buy beer right? WRONG. Apparently Buddhist holidays can last multiple days… 5 attempts and 0 beers. Nice… Guess I'll have some water on the rocks with a splash of… well… some more fucking water. Lol