Our first night, we went out to eat at Sawsdee Inn Cafe (our first meal in Bangkok at 3 in the morning), we had to meet at 7:45am for our first group activity-The Amazing Race. We roamed around Bangkok to find our clues before we moved onto a different task. We also got a taste of Bangkok's transportation system (ferry, train, tuk tuk, and the motorcycle taxi) over the entire day. It was hell! I think, believe it or not, Bangkok is probably bigger than New York City.

Later at night, we finally ended the Amazing race at approximately 7 o'clock by meeting at Mango Trees restaurant on Soi Tantawan, Surawongse Road. We all were happy to see each other again as a family and we really enjoyed hearing each other's stories about the day. Even though we all were extremely exhausted, we managed it well, and we felt that we had well earn our meal which we ate in a private room where there was full size glass windows. People could see us eating on any one of the two floors. One of our delegates had the guts to eat Serpent head fish soup and he actually ate the whole thing!

After getting together for GRO's dinner at Mango Trees, some of us went to Patpong Market and the rest went back to Khao San Road. Actually we all got body/foot massages afterwards but at different places! We definitely needed it as it was already our 2nd day in Bangkok. I gave one of GRO's beach balls to a homeless girl that I would guess was maybe one year old. I saw her lying on the sidewalk with her mom begging for some money. It did not impact me until about a few hours later when Alim, Anthony, Erin and I was about to go back to our hostel. We were about to hop into a tuk tuk, and all of a sudden, I saw the same little girl and the mother across the street from the market. I was puzzled because I saw that the mother was making a "bed" on the cement with a mini baby blanket then had her to sit on it and walked back to the market as she left her baby daughter. My heart was aching, because I did not like the idea of a mother leaving a baby on the street. She was very innocent so I thought she deserved to be happy. So I went up to give her a beach ball and she was really happy. Her eyes were wide open with excitement. Too bad her mom didn't see the reaction she had. Anthony was like "well, the beach ball is currently her mom." I felt soo much better after he said that.

Day 3 - we are glad that we got our energy back after a long day of doing the Amazing race...our massages sure helped a lot! Right now, we are on the road to Floating Market and then Erewan National Park, which is about 2 hours away from Bangkok, we will have about 2 miles of hiking to do before we reach the top of 7 waterfalls which has a pool of water. I haven't seen it before, I will give more details later when we done checking it out.

Oh and one more thing I forgot to mention is that we have a water hose in every toilet room here in Thailand. I am really thankful to have it for a while! :) I think that we in the U.S. should have it to clean ourselves after peeing or whatever.

Come back again soon!

Shabnam the shabbyyy
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