Hong Kong to Bangkok

On 4/7 we went to a gigantic jade market in Hong Kong where we picked up a little something for Macrina and got a watch that had Mao on it waving his hand as the seconds ticked. It broke before the day was done, but cost about 2 USD and was worth the laughs. In the afternoon we went to a massive sports complex in the downtown Kowloon district and played ping-pong. The people there were wearing jersey's and ping-pong specific shoes and were unbelievable. No one spoke English, but a woman signaled Ty and I to come play with her and her husband. They were really good and pretty much crushed us. Afterward I played there son and it turned into an epic cultural battle. He was like twelve and had a wicked forehand.
Later on we went to a park and saw flamingos, parrots, and a bunch of other weird birds.
A couple of hours before our flight to Bangkok Ty and Weldon went to see an Iranian film about a woman who marries a man and causes trouble in his family because she doesn't follow the Koran as strict as they all are accustomed to. They said it was a touch slow by American standards, but in Iran it was probably really controversial and interesting. Meanwhile, John and I hopped on the rail and headed as far out of town as we could to Sunny Bay. We had purchased some hand held fishing gizmos and some shrimp and were going to try to catch fish. Other people had been doing it all over town and seemed to do ok, but we had a rough time and didn't get a thing.
Ok, too much detail for a blog.
That evening we hopped a plane to Bangkok and slept the entire time. We arrived at 2330 and caught a cab to our hostel, a pretty out of the way building in a poorer district of outer Bangkok. At 0200 we watched Arsenal and Villareal play in the UEFA Champions league, and discussed with a Brazilian guy the sad state of his nations football system (a subject that he got a bit heated about).
The next day we all woke up around 0730 and headed outside. We had arrived in the dark and the streets were quiet so we had no idea what to expect. The streets were hot, crowded, and busy, and we had to walk single file because we were sharing a 1.2 lane road with people pushing their good to market, kids on motorbikes, taxi's, cars, and others on foot.
We were looking for food and Vietnam visas when a man overheard our English and in pretty good English informed us that he knew a place where you could get them cheaply. We were really skeptical because people had been hustling us like crazy, but we had also heard that travel agency's really could get them more quickly and more cheaply than you could by doing it yourself at the embassy. So the man hails us a 3 wheeled taxi (pictured in one of the photos and called a tuk-tuk) and it sped us away. Driving in this thing was insane. Way way way scarier than any roller coaster or theme park or anything. We were weaving through traffic and doing like 35 mph the wrong way on one way streets so we could pass buses. We literally had to keep our hands and feet inside the cab ( a difficult task because we had crammed 4 of us into a cab the size of a small love seat)or we would surely smash them on things that were zooming by. The travel guy turned out to be super cool, and helped us book transportation north by bus, 5 nights lodging in a room with AC and breakfast, a two night trek through the rural hills of Chaing Mai, elephant rides, river floating, and gave us a ton of maps and info about Bangkok, as well as get us our visas. We realized that it was very likely that the man on the street, the cabbie, and the travel agent were "ripping us off" by charging us about 2x the price that we could get all this stuff by ourselves, but at a whopping $200US per person it was worth having someone with some experience organize things for us.
We left feeling good about our plans, and went looking for food. It was about noon and starting to get hot, but we soon found some shade, got some water, and managed a 1.5 pound bag of deep fried bananas for 40 baht (around 35 Bhat to the USD).
Next we hailed another tuk-tuk, and went and saw the "Big Budda", the Royal Palace, a couple of Wats (temples - pictured), and got a bunch more food.
At 1900 Weldon and Ty caught a bus South towards some islands for a couple of days stay ( we will meet-up on Saturday) and John and I hit a massive supermarket, a bunch of street food vendors, and than retired to our hostel.
I will work on making these posts shorter (because no one really cares that we ate bananas), but it is really hard because everything is so different and intense that it is difficult to discern what is actually cool and what is just everyday life around here. Three quick things - The food is amazing. Tuk-Tuks are the scariest things ever (maybe youtube a video or something). And we are having a blast. John and I both wish Ben was here.

PS - Mom, sorry we haven't called, we can't figure out how to use the phones. Dad -we have been using the Internet at our Hostels .