Greetings from Thailand! Day 1

Greetings from Thailand! I will try to recount much of what we've done. It may be a little detailed for some of you, but I don't want to forget anything! Happy reading! Will post pictures when I get back.

Day 1
The flight here wasn't too pleasant. On the first day, we spent approximately 18 hours on the plane. The adventure started on our first day in Bangkok. Bangkok is like many big cities - dirty, polluted, crowded, and overdeveloped. They drive on the different side of the road here and their love for their royalty is amazing! They have billboards and posters of them plastered everywhere! There wasn't much time to explore on our first day, so a few of us hit a mall. It's interesting to see how the malls are like here. They're kind of like megamalls with a huge basement food court and cheap shopping. (The rest of the floors are like any other mall in the US. You can find all the brands that we are familiar with there.) I had my first massage of our trip that night. It was an hour-long foot massage for only a few bucks. It sure was painful (and at some moments, ticklish), but I just kept convincing myself that it was good for me.

When all of our massages were done, the mall was already closed, and concerned that we wouldn't be able to easily find the taxi stand, I asked the receptionist behind the desk "taxi?" She got one of the masseuse to walk us to where a few taxis were waiting for patrons. Luckily, we asked because this place was not easy to find. With our feet all relaxed, we had to follow his brisk pace through several streets and up and down a few flight of stairs. I thought that it was awful nice of him to lead us so far, but he bummed a ride with us. Oh well. At least we got back to our hotel safe and sound. Restaurants were closed already so we decided to eat at the hotel's restaurant. We wanted to try something different, so one of the dishes we ordered was snake head something. Didn't read the rest of what it said, but I bet it would mention fish in there. We were slightly disappointed after taking numerous photos of this dish thinking that we were eating a snake's head, but to find out later that it's just a fish with a snake-like head. Oh well. Fun, nevertheless. Exhausted, we retired for the night at around 11. We had to wake up early the next morninig for our connecting flight to Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.