Day 80 - Grand Palace and Running Traffic-Light Men

Today we took again a short express boat thrill ride - this time to the Grand Palace pier. Welcome to Disney Land! I know this is something real and different - but the crowds of people, the colorfulness of the buildings and the overall amount of decoration is very similar. It's like if in Europe a complete village including churches, palaces and ordinary buildings had been built in overloaded, bright color baroque style. When we entered, the man controlling the visitor’s bags asked where we were from - he hadn’t ever heard of Switzerland.


The air was already humid, but got even more humid after a sudden downpour out of a blue sky, and the sweat peals were rolling.

First things first. A visit to the Grand Palace should start with the hall of the Emerald Buddha. Its inside is really stunning. Not only hundreds of obviously less important, gilded Buddha sculptures, but also tall stupas that contain Buddha sculptures and royal remains around the hall, which are decorated with finest Chinesse ceramic tiles. In the great hall, approximately 5 meters over the ground, the ca. 50cm tall Emerald Buddha nearly gets overlooked due to so many other decoration and precious wall paintings.

Since we were a little tired of our hotel restaurant's menu selection, in the evening we dared to walk to a little family restaurant which has good TripAdvisor ratings. Such a cute small restaurant with pictures of many content eaters, and four guitars in the corner. Should we mention that the cost was about one third of the hotel restaurant? “Wherever you come from, we can be friends – keep in touch” says the photo wall. So did we in the end: owners and guests took selfies together, and a busy day came to a happy end :-)

What I learned?

• Big rivers close to the sea follow the tides. In front of our hotel room, tons of green branches and leaves transporting any trash float from left to right in the morning, somewhen later from right to left.
• When the green phase on pedestrian traffic lights nears its end, the little traffic-light man starts to hurry. Good idea, interestingly (or luckily?) it has no equivalent for cars...

Fruit plate! Papaya, pineapple, dragon fruit, watermelon...