Grand Palace
I swear everyone went to the Grand Palace week 1 in Bangkok and somehow I missed the memo. Thankfully Jacey and Justuc (pronounced you-stuss not justice) were in the same boat so we made the trip out to the palace.
It was beautiful, don't get me wrong, but I think we did ourselves a disservice by waiting. The thing about temples (as the thing is with castles and churches in Europe) is that while they are beautiful, they are all rather similar. There are rarely things that really make a castle or temple stick out. That being said we've seen so many temples (and amazing ones at that) that the palace just seemed a bit of the same to me at this point.
I think that if we had gone to the palace first I would have been much more awe struck and wonder struck by it. The same cannot be said about Wat Pho or the temple of the giant lying Buddha. It was really quite amazing to see a giant indoor lying Buddha entirely of gold. At the end you can pay 20 baht (60 cents) and get a bucket of 1 baht coins to put in pots along the back wall as offerings. When you first walk through you can't see this process so it sounds like tons of metallic rain drops that you can't quite place.
Quick image set so you can see the sheer size of this thing.
Some really cool things about the palace though was that as Chulalongkorn students, if we show our ID (and we wore the uniform as well) we get into both the palace and Wat Pho for free. The palace is 500 baht ($15 US) and the temple is 100 baht ($3 US) so it was actually quite a nice break.
The other thing is that as Chulalongkorn students we are essentially proving that we are "Thai" and get to go into the Thai only section of one of the most beautiful temples at the palace; Wat Phra Kaew or Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Tourists are allowed in but there is a special section at the front specifically for Thai people (yes guards enforce it) and the main reason is that many Thai people actually come to worship where as tourists come to view the beauty and spectacle of the palace. Being surrounded by reverent Thai people (all in black in respect for the late His Majesty the King) was really a very nice experience to have.
One last thing is that we spotted these large statues in the temple area and they are clearly wearing top hats and non-Thai clothing and have mustaches and stuff? (Photo to come) We were pretty perplexed as to what they were doing at the temple at all since they seem so out of place...