Bangkok, day 2

So, our second day in Bangkok is going pretty well too.
We slept in late, and we went back to where the main tourist markets were from yesterday to do a little walking around and shopping again. Most of it was gone! We forgot it was Monday, I guess, and that the whole city is not on vacation with us. We bought some more light-weight pants and some souveniry stuff, and had lunch at this cool little restaurant. The restaurant, along with our guesthouse and most places here, it seems, have no partition between inside and outside. It's just a big veranda that has no doors or windows, you just walk until the roof stops covering you.
We wound up coming back for a nap this afternoon (it was really hot) and it went three hours! When we finally woke up, we did more shopping (Jessie has done more shopping since we got here than I have known her to do the whole time I have known her!) and came back to depoit our stuff... no wait, that was before the nap too. Big naps mess me up.
Anyways, after our nap we looked at the Lonely PLanet guide, and saw a restaurant that was right accross the street from our guest house! We walked over, but it was really confusing... although the guide described it as right across from the ferry stop (the ferries run on the river like buses, there are three lines, and we're going to ride one tomorrow!) you could only access it from the street! We wound up finally finding it, after a nice but fruitless walk along the river all the way to the next stop, by walking back to the street. We didn't even know that that was what it was, we just thought it looked good from the water, but it turned out to be what we were looking for. When we finally saw the sign (which was covered with salamanders) we saw it was the right place. We wound up having our most expensive meal since our arrival, dining on crab meat and white snapper, and five iced teas/coffees, for only about $20, tip included! That's crazy! And we're not talking about small serving either, or disgusting Korean crab that oozes strangely! I was impressed with the teas most though... I may go back and polish off another five tomorrow...
Today will be our last at this guest house, tomorrow we will head to China town for a night. We're going to go to a big temple and palace tomorrow (I forget the name), and we'll be riding the riverboat express, which looks pretty colourful from what we saw from our waterfront restaurant tonight. We are also going to go see the largest sprawling Buddha in the world, which is 47 meters long, and represents Buddha in his death phase, acheiving Nirvana.

So Bangkok is pretty amazing. It is like nowhere I have ever been, and has much more immediate appeal than Korea did. The area we are in right now definitely has the power to make lifers, which it clearly has out of many of the people we see. It's the type of place where you can get really comfortable, get a job at a bar or something, and just hang out for the rest of your life, sipping ultra-cheap drinks and chatting with people who pass through.
Since this is the ultra-touristy area, there's definitely a problem with seeing this as "Thailand" though. Most people we run into are not Thai, there's music we know playing everywhere, and everything is translated and super easy. Many of the people here are professional travellers too, I think. Big partiers, very sociable, or so it appears. The kind of people who I get along with personally, but always seem just a bit too cool to not be intimidating. You know what I mean? If only I knew some good ice breakers...