Thailand was such an amazingly diverse + beautiful country! We started our two week trip in March in the crazy city of Bangkok, with more street vendors, food stations, shopping malls, floating markets and tuk-tuks than we could have imagined. Although this city is completely overwhelming in parts, it actually became quite manageable once we figured out the best mode of transit (taxis!!). We stayed at this airbnb which had a fun rooftop pool + view of the city, which we immediately jumped in after 20+ hours of travel. Speaking of travel, we got stuck in China overnight after missing our connecting flight to Bangkok, and it was the WORST. Haha, if you want to hear that story, ask me later 🙂 We only brought along our new little travel camera, the Fuji X-M1, so all photos are taken with that, and a few iphone photos along the way!
We were so happy to reunite with our favorite world travelers (they joined us straight from Bali)! We kicked off our time in Bangkok with touring some gorgeous temples, Wat Pho being the first stop to see the giant reclining Buddha.
The temples were so beautiful! 
We took a 30 minute cab ride over to the Amphawa Floating Market to grab some street food (donuts!) and black tea before exploring the market. 
We then hopped on a wooden longtail boat for a ride through the market + canals – what we thought was going to be a 45 minute ride ended up being 3 hours on the smallest wooden benches you can imagine, crammed in with lots of other people 😉 Although it was fun, we’d probably recommend paying the bit extra for your own boat if you’d like to do this! It was SO cool to see the villages set on canals, complete with mailboxes and telephone poles + lots of electric wires all inches above the waterline.
How are these branches supporting this?!?!
After our morning at the floating market, we walked around SO many different neighborhoods of Bangkok. We found the flower market and browsed through there for a while…
You’ve never seen so many wires all out in the open!
This was the side street our airbnb condo was on – nice and quiet in the middle of the craziness. 
I know these are awful quality iphone photos, but they had to be included because of how crazy this night was! Lots of people had told us to take tuk-tuks around the city because they’re inexpensive. Our bargain hunting men negotiated us a fare of 50cents for all of us to a restaurant, which we were stoked about! Little did we know, our bargain fare included multiple stops at tailor shops to try to sell us things. AND I mysteriously ended up with a giant slit down the back of my shorts – we’re not sure from a pickpocket or a smooth operation to lead us right to the tailor shop that would make the money by fixing them…either way, super shady! A quick stop at H&M was in order to pick up a new pair of shorts – and the malls are soooo massive there! Every luxury brand and store you could think of are included in these mega 9 or 10 story malls. Needless to say, we used taxis after this experience 🙂
Our second night, we were pretty tired (hi, jetlag!) and ended up getting the most INCREDIBLE Thai massages – seriously, I dream about this massage. An hour for $5?! Yes please. Right next door there was an awesome little bar/board game cafe that was a fun way to end the night…even though I miserably failed at Monopoly, haha! 
After a quick morning beverage and breakfast at this great cafe next to our condo (above), we headed out to see the enormous Weekend Market. Pretty much everything you could think of is sold here! The biggest find of the day was an apothecary shop selling amazing essential oils for around $4. Oh, and they even sell pet squirrels (see the “no photo! picture below, haha.) 
In the afternoon, we took a 2.5 hour bus ride (a very inexpensive way to travel in Thailand) to the largest floating market in Thailand, Damnoen Saduak. After negotiating our fare for a private boat (we learned our lesson), we were so excited to see this as it’s the largest, most photogenic market in Thailand. What the boat dock folks failed to tell us, is that this market closes at noon every day! We arrived around 2 pm and the market was basically deserted, just a few touristy shops open. It was a little disappointing, but we did get some super relaxing time in floating down the canals, ate some soup and pineapple that we bought off some nice boat vendors and saw a few cool sights, so we’ll call it a win. So if you’re going to Thailand, just know to go in the morning, since that’s not listed on any site about the market anywhere!
The next morning, we caught a quick flight to Phuket – Part Two coming soon! (Phuket, Koh Pi Pi, Maya Bay, and more – the biggest chunk of our trip, and some of the most gorgeous scenery! And baby tigers, and elephants!)
