Welcome to the smiling country

 

Hello my beauties! Salut for everyone!

Last year I was glad to come up with an idea of starting my blog with a traditional countries’ greeting and the picture of it. I got some positive words from my readers and majority of people visiting my blog wrote me it was good and my blog stand out from the crowd. However, with the time I finished doing so and these days I was thinking of a new remarkable tradition to set up here…My aim was to make my posts interesting, curious but also informative, kind of educating so I decided to try a new thing: since today I am going to start each of my posts with a sapid fact about the day, something that happened on the day I am writing (but maybe few or hundred years ago). It’s not an extraordinary and unbelievable new idea (Google makes it pretty often while changing its logo in a very creative way) but I’ll try my best to make it enjoyable and informative anyway. 

After searching for the “past headlines”, I found a lot of interesting things but my eyes particularly caught the news about the Dutch youngest solo sailor 16 year-old Laura Dekker, who on the 21st January 2012 completed her voyage around the world that took her exactly a year and a day. Well done, girl! Actually, I do remember reading about it a year ago but it still inspires me and I thought it would be appropriate to share it here, to remind about such a brave young traveler!

I haven’t done a voyage around the world yet but anyway I am continuing with my travelling story. Today it’s “made in Thailand” fairy tale. The plane I was flying with, closed the doors, took off in Beijing and I realized that the next station was going to be “Bangkok” (from one B to another one)). Our plane arrived in the airport called Suvarnabhumi (took me around an hour to write it down)). There was information that did surprise me which I would like to share here, with you, my dears. The name of the airport means “Golden Land” when translated from Sanskrit. Unfortunately, I wasn’t lucky enough to find some bars of gold. Perhaps, it was hidden from a watchful Siberian gaze)). The airport is located in a marshland and before the land was called “Cobra Swamp”. I was glad I did arrive to the “Golden land” instead of the previous one)).
Different sources provide diverse numbers but it’s obvious (and surprising for me) that half of the cost (or even more than that) was sponsored by Japan Bank for International Cooperation because of the need of a round-the-clock airport for foreign exporting, business, etc. Another thing about Suvarnabhumi which kind of shocked me was that the construction was delayed due to the workers seeing the ghosts in the building. Thus, in September 2005, there was a ceremony hold where 99 Buddhists monks chanted to cajole the spirits. In my opinion, it’s really mysterious. 

To continue…as about me, I found the building a beautiful and creative one, also I don’t remember anything bad about it (but it happens always with me, there are no bad memories in my mind). 

Bangkok…what I can say. The first thing that is coming to my mind that LOVE is all around…the King! (sorry Reg Presley for taking a bit of your magical and famous song but that’s true). Before travelling to Thailand, I was covered with the newspapers, TV-news, online-articles saying and warning about the dangerous situation and different boycotts in the capital. Fortunately, it happened that I came to Bangkok on the 5th of December, exactly on the birthday of the king Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX). It’s unbelievably how much the citizens love their king. He is the world for them. I saw people crying while looking at his portraits (in Thai news) and they were tears of joy and happiness! Everything was peaceful, bright and lovely like there were no any problems at the time. The citizens gathered together in such a fantastic day – the birthday of their King! I felt lucky again while accidently arrived to Thailand exactly at this day! It illustrates that we should trust our intuition when booking a flight!))

I cannot point anything really extraordinary out about Bangkok. I suppose many people aware of smiles and friendliness of Thai people! You feel such warm while being there (and it’s not only because of the temperature +30 but because of the citizens too). As about the language – it was easier to communicate in English there than it was in Beijing but still had some problems. Also, there were a lot of Russians, plenty of them…like I didn’t leave my mother-land))) so I was kind of in Thaissia (Thailand+Russia))) Majority of the cathedrals (if not all) were closed due to the big marvelous birthday celebration) therefore I decided to visit a museum/gallery there and my choice was MOCA (Museum Of Contemporary Art). This trip, visit, cultural point on the “to do list” was absolutely wonderful and really inspirational therefore I decided to write about it separately and devote a whole post for the MOCA which I will hopefully post very soon, my lovelies! I hope you are the lovers of art or at least enjoy observing the beauty and creativity and will be interested in my next post. 

Thank you for travelling with “Cinderella airways”. Always yours, Natasha from Russia. See you soon!

P.S. The photos above present couple of night Christmassy views of Bangkok and some of the interesting mannequins I found in a shopping centre there (made of small flowers or clothespins, or the one with Kremlin building instead of the head).