quickie!

just a quickie before we leave for the day - we are checking out of the hotel in bangkok and i am either a superstar of organization or a disorganization, depending on whether you want to give me credit for being ready to go half an hour before the allotted time or misremembering what the time was supposed to _be_ :)
yesterday was a fairly packed day: we took tuktuks to the grand palace/royal temple complex, which is a mile square complex of buildings commissioned by king rama the first (to distinguish him from kings rama second through ninth (the current) in 1782 and it gives versailles a pretty good run for its money. you can't really see _inside_ most of the buildings, but it's all courtyards and patios and colonnades and staircases and balconies and things, and pretty much every inch of everything is covered in either gold leaf or coloured glass or both and it's quite breathtakingly beautiful. my standard for architecture is "would this look better replaced by grass/trees/whatever would have been here five hundred years ago" and
sadly the answer is almost always yes, but i think in this case this would have been allowed (except for a very weird part of it which was apparently patterned on versailles, except with a thai-style roof, to which i give the architectural snobbery thumbs down.
after that we went for ICECREAM - much needed after all the walking around and the heat, which has, as one of the aussies said, a bit of a boit to it, eh - and then on
to wat pho, another temple which is famous for housing the Reclining Buddha which basically means that it is a cathedral sized building the interior of which is totally filled by a bloody great gold buddha lying down, his head where the nave would be and his feet at the other end, and you basically walk around the edges saying, goodness, what a bloody great buddha statue that is. i especially liked that they had done the whorls of his toeprints (i don't think i have ever used the word toeprints before. is it a word? the toe version of fingerprints? toeprints toeprints toeprints. no, still sounds funny) in inlaid mother of pearl. extra fancy.
i think my favourites of the morning where the painted fresco paintings on the walls
of the grand palace illustrating the thai version of the ramayana, which share
a lot aesthetically with the early medieval european illuminated manuscripts. yes, i am consistent in my artistic taste :)
after THAT we went for a boat ride down the chao phraya river, past all the little
houses on the river that are varying degrees of mega-posh all the way down to very humble (and partly submerged in the water), all with luxuriant foliage in flower pots, very cezanne-like. the photos i took sadly sadly are completely crap, because
the water was too choppy to be able to really hold the camera still, but i will post some the next time i have internet access. okay eek have to post this and run, hope all are well,