Bangkok part 2

I found it incredibly surprising that we really loved Bangkok, but we did! We were staying in the nicest hostel which was mercifully no where near Khao San Road, but on an amazing street which looked like a scruffy slum by day but turned in to a (still scruffy) food market at night, we dined there nearly every night on delicious and very cheap (usually about 60p) meals including Liam's new favourite Pan Siew and Pad Thai and my new favourite Sticky rice with Mango and sweet coconut sauce... that has made me so hungry and I cant find it outside of Bangkok!! It was right new to the cool sky train, so we used that a lot to get everywhere.
We did loads in Bangkok, we did nearly everything in the guide book and were very touristy tourists! We took many trips up and down the Chao Phraya river to visit the three main temples (Wot Phoh, Wot Prah Kaew and the the Emerald Palace and Wot Arun - temple of Dawn), they were really impressive and beautiful (see facebook pictures). We worked out that the tourist ticket to go on the river is extortionate and so if anyone is going to Bangkok just get on a boat and pay the flat rate, its sooooo much cheaper!
We went to some of the shopping centres, but felt way to scruffy to be browsing Louis Vuiton and Gucci, so didnt spend too long there! We also went to the cinema because they are renouned for their luxury, they were very luxurious, and we saw a Thai film (I think it was Thai, although it was dubbed in Thai from English and then subtitled in English) called the Coffin (We didnt know what it would be called until we got in! It was a bit spooky but a bit crap. The best thing about the cinema was that before it starts the screen asks you to pay respect to the king (The Thais adore their king so much, you cant go far without seeing a picture of his bespecticled self, I think its really sweet), we had to stand up and watch a film of him doing stuff while the national anthem played. Of course, the more I thought about what we were doing and that you can go to prison for treason, the more giggly I got, it was so awful, luckily I managed to keep it in and Liam didnt even notice (because he was keeping his own giggles in!).
We also visited Jim Thomson's house - I still dont really know why, hes supposed to have brought Thai culture to the world, but his house was ridiculously un-Thai, even though its advertised as being the opposite. He had this big mansion in a time when Thais lived in teeny houses, and he didnt seem to follow any of their customs. It was all a bit wierd.
We also visited Khao San road by boat one afternoon, at first we were laughing at the awful western tackyness of the road - really, its much much more expensive than the rest of the city and the stuff they sell there is the sort of stuff you could probably pick up in Benidorm or probably even in Camden. I dont think the smelly backpackers realised how much they're being ripped off because they dont visit the rest of the city, which is a shame. Anyway, after all this critisism we sat down at a pub on the front of the road and didnt get up again until the middle of the night. We had a lot of Chang beer and decided that Khao San road wasnt so bad after all and even bought some fake sunglasses which we badly haggled for. We ended up eating our dinner on the pavement there too! Ah well!
After that amazing night out, I got the flu so we had to laze around our hostel for a day or two, and then we said a sad goodbye to Bangkok (although we're coming back) and headed for some random place in the middle of nowhere...