More Grand Palace!

As I walked through even more temples, past ever more intricately decorated buildings I realised there must be a never ending task of keeping all these buildings and paintings beautiful and in the manner to which the King and all of us have become accustomed to or awestruck by.

This chap was painstakingly restoring themurals along just one of the painted galleries, the murals, each telling a symbolic story, or just simply as pilllar and entranceway decoration.

They are so beautifully done and so detailed.

Every hair on this monkey below was painted in!

Finally found a picture of the Emerald Buddha on the net for you. He has 3 different oufits you see, one for the hot season, one for the rainy season, and one for the cold season. He's wearing his rainy season outfit at the moment ... a gold sou' wester, kaghoul and wellies. Ok that's not true at all. But I quite liked the mental image. It's actually the middle one here. Cold is the blankety one on the right and the hot season one is on the left. These are changed in a great ceremony by the king himself every year. The grand palace itself (that lot was just the temples and wats around the palace), was a slightly more conservative affair, but very beautiful nevertheless.

Perfectly kept within inspiringly manicured gardens it was an absolute joy to look at.

Walked back through a market and tasted some of the amazing street food on offers there, the smells were just too tempting to resist.. And so far I am not dead!

We’ll have to see though....

I have to say, even though the locals describe SE Asia as "same same but different" which i totally "get" now, I wouldn’t have touched anything off the streets in either Cambodia or Vietnam.. Especially Vietnam. Mainly because it looked horribly unsanitary and also because if you don’t like phσ, there’s nowhere to go! However the conditions in Thailand are so much cleaner... Bangkok is a modern city. I'd trust their street food over a kebab van in High Wycombe any day of the week.