We are Siamese if you please

Don't worry, we got here safely. We have just been wearing ourselves out and it has been hard to get up the strength to get to the internet cafe. After you hear everything we have to write, you may understand us feeling overwhelmed.

First of all, we are staying in the backpacker district of Bangkok. We have a room at a very clean guesthouse. It costs us only $6 and it is quite fine with us as we don't go there much. The bathrooms are shared and we decided against airconditioning because we usually get too cold in the middle of the night if the AC is on. We have two fans that blow on us all night and they are quite sufficient. The backpacker road Th Khoa San. This road is pretty fun. You walk out into what seems like a carnival every morning. There is music in the streets and tons of street vendors selling vegetarian Phad Thai for about 30 cents a portion. They make it right in front of you and it is quite good. And it fills you up. Jason and I have made a habit of eating phad thai in the morning and phad thai at night. For the last two days we have skipped lunch because we have been too busy running around. So we have been eating quite cheaply. We hear that the traffic here is HORRENDOUS but we have found it quite civilized compared to Vietnam. It is even tame compared to come US cities I have been in. The taxis here are metered and quite cheap. It is nice to ride in them because they are airconditioned.

When we were in Vietnam, a nice Australian couple told us that when we went to Thailand, the people were a lot nicer and they wouldn't try to rip us off here. After yesterday and today, we realize that the Thai's will try to rip you off; just in a more sophisticated manner.

We woke up yesterday morning with the plan of walking around the district where our hotel is and seeing the sites. "The sites" were basically a whole bunch of wats (temples). At least we assume there are temples around, we never really made it to our walking sightseeing tour. We were about a block away when a man approached us to see if we wanted to take a tuk-tuk ride. Tuk-tuk are three-wheeled mini trucks as you can see in the picture below.

The man pulle dout a map and showed us the cool places we could go. A place where elephants play soccer, the grand palace, thai boxing place, a monkey farm, etc. Well sounded nice but we said no thanks. Then he told us it would only cost us 10 baht each. 40 baht equals a dollar so you can imagine our surprise when we heard this. He said we could ride around for as long as we wanted and it would only cost us 10 baht each. "You see, the government is doing a sepcial promotion where they pay for our gas if we take tourists out. That is why we can only charge 10 baht!" I (Larissa) had read in our guidebook to be wary of people who claim they can take you on a tuk-tuk ride for cheap. They warned that the drivers would take us to places where he might be able to get commisions off of us. Like if he took us to a certain tailor shop, he would get part of whatever we spent there. I mentioned this to Jason and he said he didn't care how many places the driver took us to, its not like we were going to buy anything. "He isn't going to get more than 20 baht from me." I thought that was a pretty good point. We are in charge of ourselves and we didn't have to buy anything if we didn't want to. We figured he could take us to some cool sights and then take us to his tailor shops in between and we could humor him by looking around but not buying anything. Our first stop was at a giant golden Buddha. So far so good!
The driver was very nice and urged us to spend as long as we wanted taking pictures and such. Our next stop was a very beautiful but small wat next to a school. Here is picture of the inside.

The kids were at recess and were running laps around the wat. They cried out to us "Hello!!" as they ran past. Jason and I couldn't imagine, we were sweating from just sitting there. We couldn't imagine running in that heat. We went inside the wat and met a very friendly man. He told us that he was a history teacher at the school. He asked if we took a bus to the wat and we told him that we took a tuk-tuk. "Oh, a tuk-tuk! you can get them cheaper today! The government is doing a promotion for three months where they get their gas paid for. This is the last day, so tomorrow you probably will have to pay more but today you can get them for real cheap." That put our mind at ease. He went on to tell us how the goverment is trying to lure tourists back to the area after the tsunami by giving free gasa to the tuk-tuk drivers. We asked what some good sights to see are and he told us about the grand palace. He said that it is better to go there in the afternoon since the monks take a break to pray and the place would be closed for a couple hours around noon. Another good place would be top 10 collection. He said they are the best tailors around and they will make you a real nice suit out of cashmere for only around $250. We thought that was a lot of money since we only paid 50 in Vietnam. He said they probably weren't real cashmere. We agreed. We asked him what a good bus service was since we had heard reports of some tourists being drugged and robbed on some bus lines. He told us to make sure to go to TAT. They are the government travel agency so they have buses that you can be sure are safe. You also get what you pay for which, as we learned in Vietnam, you have to worry about sometimes. We thanked him for his kindness and went off to find our tuk-tuk.
He told us he was taking us to top 10 collection. "Oh they must be good if everyone knows about them" we thought. We went in and broswed around and left. Ha, we thought. He thought he could get a commission. Off we went to TAT travel. We bought two bus tickets to phuket. We talked to a very nice but unhelpful person who sold us the tickets. They were a little more expensive than other places we saw but we had decided it would be worth the money to have peace of mind.
After that he took us to another nice wat. This was also next to a school. After we came out, our tuk-tuk driver looked somewhat ill and told us he was going to use the toilet. we sat in our tuk-tuk to wait. Two tourists were sitting near another tuk-tuk next to us and they struck up a conversation with us. One guy was from Malaysia but lived in Canada and the other guy was from England. They told us some of the cool places they saw and told us we should check them out. Then the guy from Canada told us about how he comes every time he visits here, he buys a couple blue saphire pieces of jewelry and takes them home and sells them to jewelry stores for 100% profit. 80% of all blue sapphires come from thailand so we could get a good price. He said he could give us the name of quality shop since a lot of them had worthless jewelry. We wrote down the name of the place he gave us and he gave us his email address just in case we weren't sure where the best places to sell the jewels were. He also said that they give you a %20 discount if you pay with cash. You know in cartoons where you can tell the character is motivated by the money because dollars signs go cha-ching in their eyes? Well, if you had looked closely enough, you would have seen the dollar signs in our eyes. Jason has always been interested in reselling objects for more money and he is very good at it. We asked the driver to take us there and we sat back thinking about the money we could make. We got to the store in to find a beautiful place with rows upon rows of jewelry. Everything was beautiful. The saleslady was really nice and showed us everything. The prices seemed steep but I have never shopped for real jewelry so I wasn't sure what a good price would be. Since Jason and I are cautious people, we asked for their business card and told them we would think about it. The saleslady said that they were only open to the public for another hour, usually they only sold their wholesale goods to exporters but today they had opened it up to the public. Plus today was the only day we would get a discount. Jason and I were sold enough on the idea that we had almost planned on going to find out a way to get that much cash and come back a day or two later after researching things more. At this point though, we figured we wouldn't have enough time to make an informed decision so we took her business card and left thinking we its too bad but I guess we wouldn't be buying any jewels.

The driver took us to another small but beautiful wat. We walked into the compound, not sure where exactly to go when a man sitting on a park bench told us that the wat was closed for about 10 minutes more so the monks could pray. We sat down on a bench near him and read our guidebook while we waited. He started talking to us and told us about some cool places to go. After a while, he asked us if we had been to buy any jewelry yet. We said we had gone but we hadn't ended up buying any. He asked us why not? We could sell it in America for a good profit. He showed us a reciept showing us that he had just bought some gems. He had bought them from them same store as we had just been to. He said we should go back to the store because it was going to close soon and this is the only day it is open for tourists. This sounded remarkably like what the saleslady had said and suddenly, like a bolt of lightening, we got suspicious. We opened the guidbook and read a section all about gem scams. It said there were tons of very skilled con artrists that will try to lure you into a nearby gem store to buy some gems to sell in your country. Things began to click into place. Those tourists were fake tourists and con artists. The history teacher, everyone had just been trying to set us up to buy the next thing. Everything we had been through and every person we had met had been gearing us up for the biggest con of all; buying fake gems. They almost got us...... More later.