Monday, November 13
Wow, can’t believe it is the last day of my trip although I did a lot! My last day was filled with tours in the morning and shopping in the afternoon. In the morning, we took a river boat to the Grand Palace passing my temple, Wat Arun the temple of Dawn. 😊
The Grand Palace is actually a complex of buildings and has been the official residence of the king since 1782. Unlike the temples in Cambodia, the ones in Thailand still have all the gold and other colors making them quite beautiful. We walked around to look at the buildings and were able to visit one that had a jade Buddha that wears different outfits made of gold. Each season the king will change the outfit.
We then headed over to the Thai royal textiles at the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles. It was pretty cool. They showed all the Queen and Queen mother’s clothing which was very beautiful! If you wanted you could have clothes handmade for you. Her shoes were beautiful. Then we had a tuk tuk ride. The tuk tuk’s in Thailand are a little different. The roofs were lower making it difficult to see out and they were one unit vs a cab behind a bike like in Cambodia.
They dropped us off to see Wat Pho, the temple of the reclining Buddha which is one of the oldest temples. There is a Buddha inside which is huge and all gold. It takes up the whole building! There were so many people it was hard to get pictures, but we were able to get a few. We then headed back to the hotel by boat.
In the afternoon, we took the hotel boat shuttle to the Icon mall near the hotel. It had a market downstairs and fancy shops upstairs. There were also many places to eat, which none of us were interested in. We spent most of our time walking around the markets. There was all variety of items from clothing to jewelry, leather goods and snack items. They even had a “spa” / a place we could get a Thai massage. A couple of us decided to try the massage. We didn’t go all in, but did get the head, neck and back massage for 30 minutes for under $10. It was so good, I could have used another 30 minutes and it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.
In the evening we had our farewell dinner in the hotel.
Photos
Additional photos coming