Museum, Palace And Pagoda

Enough of the sadness, I head to the National Museum which is OK – better than the Bangkok one and I wander around the place soaking in the history of what is an amazing place – culturally and artistically.

After lunch at a spicy beef noodle soup restaurant, I walk back to the hotel to change into long trousers as I am going to the Royal Palace and silver Pagoda where you need to be suitably attired…I walk there, and have to avoid the plethora of tuk-tuk and motorbike drivers, guidebook vendors and cold water sellers. The drivers are easy – you can shake your head and walk on: they are unlikely to follow you as they have a vehicle to look after. The book and drink sellers however are different – they can walk with you down the street insisting that you buy from them. I tell one particularly persistent boy that I’ll buy something later, and that seems to do the trick.

The Palace grounds are pretty spectacular and I am eager to find the Silver Pagoda – so called after the thousands of silver tiles that apparently make up the roof. I was expecting to see some shimmering silver-roofed building and was getting more puzzled by the lack of said building – so after consulting with my guidebook to try and locate the building, apparently it was the one that housed the emerald Buddha. Well, I’d just seen that housed in a rather ordinary (by expectation) pagoda. Maybe the silver had tarnished, but it certainly wasn’t the glamorous site I was expecting.

Making my way back to the hotel, I was chased down the street by a boy who insisted that I promised I’d buy water from him when I left the Palace.