what's the capitol of thailand?

BANGKOK!

That joke will never get old. Ever.

Yesterday we landed in Bangkok, Thailand after about twenty-six hours of traveling, starting in San Francisco we had an 12 hour flight to Taipei, Taiwan then a 2 hour flight to Hong Kong, China and finally followed by a 6 hour flight to the land of a thousand Buddhas.  Our flights were fairly uneventful with the exception of transferring flights in Hong Kong where Emily became an enemy of the Chinese government by trying to smuggle in firearms and ammunition, specifically teargas (that's the royal chinese police's way of saying she forgot to take her bottle of pepper spray out of her purse, apparently it's illegal in China.)  We had a little delay as she got questioned as to the origin of her pepper spray and why she had it, in the end we got out unscathed.  

When we landed in Bangkok we wandered around the airport looking for a place to buy our tickets to Kolkata but everywhere we went we kept getting sent in a different direction so we decided that it would be cheaper, smarter, and a whole lot less stressful to just buy our tickets online, so hopefully we'll get that done later this afternoon.  We hopped on a bus from the airport to take us to Khaosan rd. the heart of Old Bangkok where the hustle and bustle of the giant city seems to reach a climax.  There are 7-11's on every street here and at least 4 or 5 youth hostels around every corner, so when we decided to rent a room it was really a bit of a shot in the dark, however we met a girl named Marsha on the bus who is from Holland and has been traveling around southeast asia and australia for the past year.  She was amazingly helpful and helped us find our home for the week, "The Happy House Guest House."  Marsha had some amazing stories that stretched as far as Delhi, India to Singapore to New Zealand and a Holland accent that would send even David Hasselhoff into catatonic shock.  

Our hostel is very nice, we have a triple room on the fifth floor which consists of three beds about six inches apart, a tv, and a bathroom where the shower head is above the toilet (Try figuring that one out!)  After we got situated last night we decided to go on a walk around our new neighborhood to try and get a little bit of a bearing on this city, we walked down two streets and realized that we were just about as lost as we could be, between every street vendor selling the same t-shirts and bracelets and every tiny street looking almost exactly the same we knew we had a little bit of an adventure in front of us.  We wandered around for a couple of hours making sure not to get too far away from Khaosan rd. and eventually got a little bit of a feeling for our new neighborhood.  We ate some great pad thai and listened to a little thai boy play covers of everything from "Hey there Delilah" to "I walk the line".  I've only been here for about 13 hours and I'm falling in love with the city, I've never seen or experienced anything like this.  While we were walking last night, everyone we stopped and talked to, even the shop owners who were trying to persuade us to buy their stuff, were the nicest people in the world who were just looking for a good conversation.  So we gave it to them. 

Namaste,

Heath

Here are some quick pictures from the last couple of weeks, there aren't any from Bangkok yet but hopefully i'll be able to put some of those up later today or tomorrow: