We had to come back to Bangkok because we are going to Myanmar(Burma) next and need to get visa's before we arrive in Myanmar and Bangkok is the easiest and fastest place to get them in Southeast Asia. Bangkok is also the international gateway for flights to Myanmar with the most frequent service and the cheapest flights. As always we arrive places on the wrong days and arrived in Bangkok on Saturday and the Embassy doesn't open until Monday morning.
The bus from Cambodia dropped us off in the Khaosan Road area so we stayed at a guesthouse there the night before last. Yesterday we moved to the Central Business District of Bangkok because it is very close to the Myanmar embassy. For the first time in Southeast Asia our hotel upgraded us to some kind of amazing suite, with a lounge, dining area and kitchen, all for $20 a night!
We spent yesterday at the Chatuchak markets, which are enormous. Janelle bought a couple of things and I just walked around being annoyed that I didn't have a camera.
We woke up early this morning and went to the Myanmar embassy where we were joined by a surprising number of other westerners. To get the visa it normally takes two business days but if you already have an airplane ticket they can "fast track" your visa to same day service. We were able to convince them we had a plane ticket already purchased, which we didn't as I was worried we wouldn't get our visa's in one day and would waste money on a flight we couldn't board. The people at the embassy were incredibly nice, they spoke great English, had a sense of humor, were helpful and patient. I think the "you are supposed to act miserable all the time" page must have been missing from their training manual, it was a welcome change from any document application center I have ever been to anywhere in the world.
We dropped off the visa application in the morning and had to come back in the afternoon to pick it up. As I was so distraught about not having a camera we went to the MBK shopping center and spent hours, Janelle probably thought it seemed longer, looking at all kinds of cameras and I finally found one I liked and at a price I was willing to pay after a lot of running around.
We went back and got our visa's complete with pictures of ourselves on them and then booked our flights to Myanmar for tomorrow morning at 7am. Time to get some sleep.
Check out the rest of today's pictures in the slideshow below:
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