Floating Market

This morning, Elle and I got up super early to go to the floating market. We booked a tour with the hotel that would take us there and to a few other attractions in the area. We met our group in the lobby and took off on the hour drive out of Bangkok. When we got there we hired paddle boats to take us down the river. The people there were selling fruit, clothes, and all the classic souvenirs we have seen everywhere. This market really is like Venice (except filthy) in that there are no streets so you literally have to take the boats everywhere. It was fun, but so hot, and we had this obnoxious guy in our boat that would stop at every single stall and bargain for 10 minutes while we all just sat there. After the floating market they took us to this elephant village where people could go on elephant rides, and watch monkey shows. Elle and I are planning to do an elephant trek in Phuket so we opted out of this one. After that, we went to a cobra show which apparently was just a million snakes doing tricks. I hate snakes, so for 250 baht we opted out of that too. After we got back to our hotel we went to the gym and worked out and went swimming and just hung out for a bit. We went to dinner at this vegetarian Indian restaurant and it was so good! On our way to the restaurant we passed by this frail, crippled old man who was hunched over so far who was pushing a cart full of trash and bottles. We both looked at him and felt so awful, he was easily 80 years old and he was moving like 3 millimeters a minute. We ended up just going to dinner, where we were for a good hour and a half at least. We saw him again as we were walking back to the hotel and he literally had made it like one block. I could not just walk by him again so we stopped and just watched him for like 10 minutes trying to figure out how we could help him. We thought about giving him money or buying him food but we didn’t know if that was offensive. We were standing there when he started inching across the street. You have to understand these streets are absolutely crazy, everyone drives a million miles and hour and they stop for nothing, there was no way he was going to make it across the street alive. We decided this was our opportunity so Elle stopped traffic and I helped him push his cart across the street. He spoke zero English obviously but he was just a sweet little thing, he just smiled and laughed and I’m sure he thought we were nuts. When we got across the street the vendors on the street started applauding us. We couldn’t just let him go, so we ran into subway to get him some food. He didn’t have any teeth so we bought him some soup and orange juice and when we came out he obviously hadn’t gotten very far so we caught up to him and gave him his food, and he was just so cute.

Now for my 5 minute soap box, this little man was easily 80 years old, almost completely crippled, it’s 5 million degrees outside and here he was collecting bottles picking up trash on these rat infested streets to sustain himself, and yet there are 35 year old, able bodied people standing on street corners right now in America holding up signs asking for money or food. So here’s a shout out to all of those people, GET A JOB! People have no idea how good they have it. No idea. Anyway… we have successfully completed our tour of Bangkok and tomorrow we head off to Phuket!

The Floating Market

The poor little man we bought dinner for. Elle is in the picture  as a disguise so it wasn't so obvious we were following him around taking pictures.