Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Grand Palace


On Sunday morning, we breakfasted on wonton noodle soup on the street near our hotel. This was probably the most chinese dish that we'd had so far and we didn't even need to go all the way to Chinatown to find it:


We then got the number 53 bus to The Grand Palace, the official residence of the Thai king and Bangkok's most popular (possibly) tourist attraction. I'd missed out on visiting it on previous visits to Bangkok so was looking forward to seeing it this time. The only possible problem is that the palace is still used for official functions and is closed when these are going on. These are rare so we thought it pretty unlikely that our visit would coincide with one.

Here are some pictures that I took:





One interesting thing that we found in the palace complex was what looked like a scale model of the palace in the old capital of Ayutthaya, the ruins of which we had seen on our previous visit to Thailand:


Some of the golden chedis were held up by some kind of freaky dudes:



Near the temple of the Emerald Buddha, we found a shrine featuring some kind of bovine cow statues:




Here is some kind of chedi with a bell in it:


Here is the entrance to an important building being guarded by a fierce looking soldier:


As I mentioned, parts of the palace complex were used for official functions and, unfortunately, the temple Emerald Buddha was closed for just such a function:


We weren't sure what it was at the time but, later, it turned out that none other than Barack Obama was in town, Thailand being the first country that he chose to visit after the US presidential election. There are two ways to look at it: either President Obama has the same excellent taste in places to visit as us, or he is rather selfish and mean for causing us to miss out on seeing the Emerald Buddha.

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