First Day In Bangkok

Weather
We expected it to be raining with intermittent thunder showers for the first 4 days in Bangkok but so far it's been dry, and by dry I mean unbelievably humid and very hot... but not raining. Yesterday was very sunny most of the day, while today is a little overcast but still very hot. We drink more water than you would believe in an effort to remain hydrated after sweating so much of it out.

Accommodations
Our first two nights were spent at a nice hotel in the Si Lom neighborhood, which turns out to have quite a bit of night life. In fact, when we first arrived at about 2am we were awake and decided to wander around for a while. We saw many people out and about well into 4am.

We had a full day of shopping yesterday for our next place to stay. We are looking for something a bit less expensive and saw everything from the very rank, to the possibly livable, to the well overpriced. We found some good options and are debating between 2 places now, which we'll stay in for only 2 or 3 days before finding another place closer to where our course will be held.

Food
Our first morning we used a coupon we had for a complimentary breakfast at our hotel. The Japanese breakfast option looked the best, and it consisted of pork katsu, rice, strange pickled things, salty seaweed flake sheets, miso soup, and rice. While walking around we stopped at a street vendor for a bag of corn that had been cut fresh from the cob, and a bag of rambutan fruit.
















Our first real Thai meal was at a small alley restaurant and we ordered green curry with vegetables, and shrimp with a basil and chili sauce. Both dishes were extremely spicy even for our normally spicy pallets.

This morning we had our first dose of street food -- tom yam seafood soup(which ended up having some chicken in it too), and stir fried mixed vegetables(which turned out to be a deep fried pork and onion omelet... um, language barrier). Both were very tasty. We were also served unwanted cups of watery tea. We have been avoiding unbottled or unboiled water. We took a few sips, I'll let you know.




















































Wildlife
We had heard to stay away from the wild dogs around town. They are all over the place and look pretty mangy, but they seem to keep to themselves. We also see a lot of wild cats that don't look too healthy either. No mosquitos so far, and a very few but really large and fast beetles from time to time rush past in front of you on the sidewalk.