Saturday was a different story. This was a whole day full of adventure. Four different countries: Italy, Spain, Romania and South Africa on a hunt to visit as much of the city as possible. Everything started with a great taxi driver - Charlie - who amazingly spoke a bit of English...and recommended us to take the boat on the Canal. I must add the fact that this city is huge, but every street you go on looks exactly like the other, so you constantly have the felling that you are going around. The amazing thing is that taxi drivers have no idea where main streets actually are. I don't know if this is because they actually have a different name in Thai, or we don't pronounce it correctly or...I don't know, but it is confusing. Anyway...here the taxi is the best and only way to get around, even if the traffic is horrible!!
Anyway this turned out to be a great experience as we got to see a different side of the city. The side which is even poorer that what we saw on Patpong.
On the Canal people actually have their houses in water. The image of people washing themselves, clothes and probably getting water to cook from the dirty Canal was a shock. Children leave here and I even saw somebody who had a dog on the porch. Some literally have a 10 cm of water in their houses. I have to admit that some houses were really nice, but all in all it just looked like a permanently flooded city.
As soon as we got off the boat a new era began for my smelling senses. I think this is the city with the worst smells I have ever felt in my life. Nothing could ever beat this. The thing is that they don't sell just objects in their street markets (which are on every street), they sell food...meat that stays for a whole day in a terrible heat, fruits and dried fish (which is absolutely the worse).
Our goal was to see the Royal Grand Palace, but I've learned that you should never make plans in Bangkok. Everything happens really fast and one plan becomes another in a couple of seconds. Instead of going to the palace we got on two tuk tuks which took us around the city for a couple of hours. The experience was great, until one of the tuk tuks broke....and to fix it the drivers tries to connect the two with a rope that obviously broke when we started the engine...but it did get the other one working.
The story never ended because it was too long and exciting...to many things to write down...