Between Sex Shops and Lord Buddha: Thailand

If you ask anyone who has visited Thailand about their trip, the first thing that comes out of their mouths are the massive number of sex shops and nude beaches scattered around ( clearly I'm not an exception to this rule ). Walking down the market streets of the city, almost every second shop seems to have erotic posters and dangling sex toys, and funnily enough, in spite of their in your face shameless advertising, these shops are full of people, having more customers than most other shops on the streets.

Reclining Buddha

Emerald Buddha

But, Thailand is a lot more than just a tourist destination where one can realise his/her sexual fantasies. The country is a beautiful, almost heavenly connection, between nature and religion. The millions of Buddha statues, some scattered in the most remote parts of the country, always tend to be in harmony with their surroundings.
The two Buddhas that you just have to visit, are the Emerald Buddha and the Wat Po, which houses an enormous reclining Buddha. The Emerald Buddha though beautiful, is minuscule, and it took me ten minutes to actually realise what it was, and how it looked. The Golden Pagoda in the Emerald Buddha complex is quite breathtaking though.

Golden Pagoda

Ayutthaya

Ayutthaya

The city of Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand, is also worth visiting, with its palaces that have a mixed architecture, with local, Chinese and Indian influences. How many of you know about the famous bridge over river Kwai, which the Japanese had built using Allied POWs, with almost 80,00 to 100,000 dying in the construction; a movie was also made on it? Well, this bridge still exists, though traversing it is positively frightening!

Bridge Over River Kwai

On the way to the bridge, we stopped at a tiger farm, I keep forgetting it's name, but it's pretty well known. Though it gives you the exhilarating experience of petting a tiger, I really didn't like the place. The tigers were chained and treated like domestic animals. They had grown fat and ugly due to their domestic lifestyle, it just seemed altogether sad. Oh, but one of the rules of entering that place was that you could not wear anything red, orange or pink, and funnily enough my parents and my sister happened to be wearing something red that day, so we had to stop on the way and buy shirts for the three of them so that they could enter.
We also visited the island of Phuket, which is absolutely beautiful. The weather is extremely unpredictable; one second it's as sunny and hot as a desert, and the next moment it's raining cats and dogs. The circuses of Phuket are one of the last ones in the world where animals are still used to perform acts. Frankly though, in spite of the grandiose claims of these circuses, I found them very boring, and slept halfway through it.
The boating and snorkelling off the coast is mind-blowing and we also visited the shooting site for one of the Bond movies, again I forget the name. Forgive my bad memory, I took this trip quite a while back.

Phuket

In Bangkok, our hotel was pretty close to the main shopping area of the city, so every night after we were done sight-seeing, we would walk to the market street and do some shopping. The streets are very lively with noisy, yet happy, people walking up and down, buying goods, selling them, customers haggling over prices, and live food being fried and sold at ever corner. Oh and about the live food, it look disgusting before it is fried, and the smell of the stale oil used for frying is absolutely nauseating. I, who has never puked for anything in my life, actually puked twice into the drain on the side of the road at that smell. It is...unimaginably bad.
But, all in all, my trip to Thailand was pretty memorable for the right and wrong reasons I guess.