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Week 3- Bangkok- Day 2
Although we had a good night sleep we were up early because someone's alarm was going off and they didn't turn it off.. The life in a mixed dorm! We drifted back off to sleep, however, about an hour later we were woken again by loud drums and a marching parade.. Our room didn't even have a window so it was clearly extremely loud!
We got up and had breakfast down in the communal area with other people staying in the hostel. We decided that we needed to buy massive water guns and go crazy for Songkran so that is exactly what we did!
We wanted to go to the weekend market, this is the biggest market in Thailand. We decided to try and save a bit of money so thought we would adventure out on the local buses! Well this was an experience even trying to find the right bus stop especially while getting soaking wet by the local Thais with water guns! We waited for the bus for about 30 minutes but it only cost us 13 baht which is about 30p. We had lots of fun having water fights while at the bus stop. We were worried they wouldn't let us on the bus as we looked liked we had just got out of the bath in our clothes!
The market was loads of fun and absolutely huge!! We didn't get to see the whole thing as it's so big. They sold everything you can imagine there! We particularly liked all the clothes and cookery bits. The market was very colourful and wasn't even that busy which was nice. We spent about 2 hours wondering around aimlessly taking in all the beautiful bits. There was so much we would have bought if we didn't have to carry it for another 5 months!
There were loads of food stalls that looked and smelt so good, although, we were a bit worried about trying it. We found one that was full of Thais and decided this was a good sign and went for it. I had fried chicken and spicy rice with salad which was really good! The sauce for the chicken was SO hot though I thought my mouth was on fire! Gemma had vegetables and rice. We also tried Thai crackers which were really .
We couldn't even work out how to cross the road outside the market let alone catch the bus home so we decided to get a tuk tuk. This was hilarious, we had a man named Manis. We were shooting people with our water guns out the side of the tuk tuk yet he was the worst I repeat WORST get away driver we have ever come across. He also kept stopping where the locals had massive hoses so they would drench us. I think he found this really funny so we decided to soak him too! It was quite a long journey back because there was so much traffic from Songkran to Manis did lots of singing for us. This was by far our most entertaining mode of transport. He also did a little happy dance when we chanted his name!
Once we finally reached Khaosan road it was manic, I have never seen so many people with water guns! We had to make Manis drive further down the road because we couldn't open our dry sacks to get the money out for him without getting a bucket of water over our head! So in this chaos Gemma was bursting for the toilet, however, we had no idea where our hostel was. We were so disorientated! After about 20 minutes of walking around lost we found the previous hostel we had been staying in so we sneaked in there. I'm sure they had forgotten we had checked out!
We decided it was time to really hit the chaos and head to Khao San road for Songkran. This was so hectic. You couldn't really walk down the street, it was just a sea of people! There was lots of bars pumping out both music and water! This was fun for about 5 minutes until no one could actually move. It then turned into let's try and get out of here alive. There were lots of people pushing forward so we were very happy to be out of there. As part of the tradition of Songkran the Thai mix white chalk with water and wipe it on each other's faces! However, after the hundredth Thai lad has grabbed your face in a crowd it gets rather annoying so as party poopers we are we decided we had had enough of getting soaked and headed back to our hostel for a well needed shower!
Once we were all clean and fresh we didn't want to leave our hostel for dinner! We even tried researching Pizza Hut take away but they wouldn't deliver because of the festival. We managed to get to the restaurant next to our hostel without get wet by going down am alley! We demolished some food and headed back up to our room. I managed to FaceTime home and see Olivia and Fraser my little cousins so this was great! Olivia has grown up so much and Fraser is a little pudding :-)
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