Travel-Trotter

Nareekan’s uncle Tony (Toi) was gracious enough to offer to drive us up to Ayutthaya and tour the ruins from the former capital of Siam.  The ride only took an hour and was nice to get out of the big city, our first stop was dubbed the funny temple.  It had lots of kitchy tourist stuff around small ruins.  We floated some candles and fed some crazed catfish, it was certainly an experience.

Our second stop was the faux floating market and elephant rides, we didn’t partake in the rides on the elephants.  Caroline will explain in her blog due on friday.  We did feed them though which was really quite an experience.  We took a little boat ride around the floating market but had to get off our boat to walk around to the stalls with food and other stuff to purchase, the market was more like a pond with shops around it.  We did try some new foods, including fruit snack like things, coconut pudding, quail eggs, thai tea, hair burritos, thai popsicles and a few other things that we couldn’t identify.  Ok, the hair burritos need a bit more explanation… they were this stringy sugary candy that looked like hair and melted like cotton candy, you put it in a crepe and you eat it.  It was quite strange and we laughed about our hair burritos the rest of the day.

We went to lunch next which was overlooking the river and was an amazing assortments of Thai favorites: frog legs, tom yon soup, green curry, pad thai.  Probably my favorite meal of the trip so far.

After lunch we visited the largest ruins, the former royal palace which was destroyed during a war with the Burmese in the 1760’s.  It was still amazingly spectacular, lots of intricate brick structures, remnants of some Buddha statues although most had been removed.  We also saw the famous Buddha head in the tree roots (first picture).  We only spent a couple hours but probably could have wandered around the ruins for 2 or 3 days, but other adventures await us.

After driving home and saying our fairwells to Nareekan, Tony and Pim Pim we met up with Maddy’s friend Amy and her husband and sister.  Maddy was friends with Amy from the Peace Corps.  We had a lovely dinner overlooking the city although the twins slept through dinner, I guess jet lag caught up with them.