Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day -1 (Milan)

February 5

Jetlag is strange. Despite being dead-to-the-world before 8 PM yesterday, we were completely awake at 2 AM and took several hours for us to get back to sleep and then, it was not really good sleep. It did not help that the temperature in the room was 25 C (~80 F). It appears that they only heat rooms in the winter, not cool, so we have to regulate the temperature by opening the window. We shower in a space capsule-sized shower and then head down to breakfast. It is a typical European layout - we have prosciutto and another ham-like meat, a choice of cheeses, way too many dolces (sweets) like chocolate pear or apple tarts, but also some fairly healthy stuff like yogurt and fresh fruit. 

After breakfast, Steve tackles his first job: getting his pin vest ready. He's got a black vest from Salt Lake City 2002 that will eventually be completely covered by Olympic pins to trade, but he has to work his way up to carrying that weight, so he decides to start with about 50 pins. He also has a hat from the Lillehammer 1994 Olympics with another 50 or so pins. He has learned that the metal pinbacks often don't hold well in lower temperatures, so all of these pins are held with rubber pinbacks. He has another 20 pins in his pocket to give away with the goal of getting rid of at least 10 per day so that he comes home with fewer pins than he left with.

The Olympics are so big now that all of the events don't fit into the official 16 days allotted for them, so even though the Opening Ceremonies are not until tomorrow night, we've got tickets today for women's ice hockey where Germany is going to play Sweden. The game isn't until 12:15 PM, but we haven't been on Milan's metro yet and we are unsure how long it will take to get to the stadium, so we leave around 10 AM.

Our hotel is on the southern edge of the city center, and we are going to the northwest corner, so we have to change lines twice to get there. But there are very few people on the metro after rush hour, and we get to our stop in about 45 minutes. On the metro, we meet a couple from northern Ohio who were admiring Steve's pins. They tell us that they had always wanted to attend the Olympics but were waiting to get their son through college and now hope to attend many of them. We wish them a good stay in Milan and head out of the metro.

Once outside, we see this:

This arena complex, which includes both the smaller of the two Milan 2026 ice hockey venues and the speed skating oval appears to be owned by the Italian power company. There is a display indicating how many megawatts of power their solar farms are generating. We wondered whether the decorative roof artwork, which extends in a straight line for about a mile, is part of the solar array, but we've never heard of transparent solar voltaic systems so maybe this really is just artwork.

At the beginning of every Olympics, we find the intersection where planning meets reality. In this case, we pass through security where Steve has to take off his vest, hat, backpack and fanny pack for inspection (all these pins set off metal detectors very well!). Then we continue walking for perhaps half a mile along a completely controlled area only to come to another security station where we have to do the same thing. We're not sure why they need a second one to screen people who have already been screened, but it is what it is.

Since we are way early to arrive, the previous game is still going and we have to wait in a pretty long line for the gates to open to let us in. While we are waiting, we see a couple of guys near us who are wearing RPI hats (RPI is the college we both attended). Beth decides to be bold and walks over to talk to them. They remind her that Nina Christhof, who is the Captain of RPI's women's hockey team was named to play for Team Germany so they are here to support her. We see an older couple ahead of us who are wearing matching Christhof hockey jerseys and we guess they might be her parents.

Once they let us in, we head directly to the concession stands to grab a light lunch before the game starts. Steve picks a prosciutto and cheese ciabatta sandwich, and Beth has a spec (another sort of ham) and provolone cheese sandwich. The guy taking our orders tells us to wait at the side of the concession stand. We think that since the sign says hot and cold sandwiches, that they intend for these to be heated. While we are waiting, we engage in the kind of conversations that we always seem to have at the Olympics. We meet three Italian guys who don't speak much English, but we make out that they are grandfather, son and grandson. The grandfather understands a little English and the grandson can speak a little English. They ask us about where we are from, how long we are staying in Italy and why is Steve wearing all of these pins. Steve tells them that pins is the sport of the spectator and hands the grandson a pin. He thanks Steve very much and then decides that his grandfather, who shares the same first name, should get the pin. Steve gives the grandson another one. Then they wish us buono giorno (good day) and head off. Several minutes later, we finally get our sandwiches and find that if they were ever warm, they certainly aren't now. It was unclear whether they intended that or that some guy in the back was making each sandwich one at a time instead of handing out premade ones.

We find our way to our seats and find that we are sitting next to the couple from Ohio! This is not too surprising as ticket allocations to other countries are typically in blocks although we did not expect it now that all Olympic ticketing is run through the host country. We had expected that Sweden would stomp on Germany, but Germany surprises us by scoring first and midway through the game, it was tied 1-1. Sweden does finally take over and wins 4-1, but it was a good game.  Here are some of Steve's pictures:

We walk back to the metro with the goal of finding an electronic store that our hotel desk person told us might have a power connector for an HP laptop that Steve forgot to pack. It has the advantage of being one station away from the Duomo. When we get on the metro, we again end up running into the couple from Ohio, who kid us that we much be following them. This time, Steve remembers that his goal is to give away pins and hands them a couple to start their collection. A couple of minutes later, a woman comes up and asks Steve if he would like to trade. She apologizes that all she has are pins from Albertville 1992. No problem, she finds a hockey pin from Vancouver and Steve takes a curling pin. Then Steve turns to the couple from Ohio and says that this is why he is wearing all of these pins. Their station is before ours and as they leave, we tell them kiddingly that we will see them tomorrow!

The hotel's directions to the electronics store, which is in the metro station, were very good. We find a person that works there, ask if he speaks English (he does!) and Steve tells him what he needs. He says that he thinks that he has something that works, but if not to save the box and the receipt and he can bring it back for a refund.

That chore taken care of, we head outside. There is an Olympic merchandise store right there, but we know that the Olympic Superstore is next to the Duomo so we decide to go there. We know that we are close, but don't know which direction to go and the buildings in this area are too tall to see anything. This also makes it hard for Google maps to figure out where we are because it can't get see enough satellites. But we get a rough idea of the direction and head off. It looks like we are walking along what the organizing committee calls the Olympic Boulevard because we see this:

The pictograms above the street must look really great at night! There are barricades up all along the street and we learn later that the Olympic torch relay will pass along here tonight. A little more walking and we find the Piazza al Duomo which is right across the street from both the Olympic Superstore and the famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle II (named after the 1st king of unified Italy) shopping plaza:

The line to the Superstore looks long, but it moves fairly fast. Many people are admiring Steve's pins and he gives some away to an enthusiastic group of women wearing Team Netherlands outfits. It turns out that they all work at Dutch House, one of the many Team houses set up around the city part to stimulate tourism, part to give the athlete's families and supporters a place to celebrate all of their team victories. We find that Dutch House is quite close to our hotel and make a point of visiting sometime while we are in Milan. The Superstore itself is underwhelming. Our son Sean collects Olympic mascot plushies, but there are no Tina mascots (Tina, short for Cortina is a Sloat, a type of weasel), no Olympic pins and no long sleeve shirts. We are hoping that this is just a short-term stocking problem and not that they are already out of merchandise before the Games even start!

Back outside, we hear an announcement that the Duomo station and the station that we got off at will both be closed at 5 PM due to the torch relay. The area around the Duomo station is really crowded so we decide to walk back to the other station. This is a little more complicated than Steve had thought (we just need to go down one more block and turn right) because none of the streets in Milan are straight or approach each other at right angles. We finally end up making a sort of U turn around the Galleria and back onto the Olympic Boulevard close to where we originally got onto it. From there it is only a short walk and one stop on the metro to our hotel.

We are both getting pretty tired, so we decide to drop our stuff at the hotel and head back out for a quick light meal. This is actually the only choice because Italians typically don't eat dinner until 7-8 PM and a lot of the restaurants are not even open before 7 PM. We find a place where we can get a cocktail and "snacks" for one price called an Apperitivo. It is typically served in bars, and you are paying for the drinks, not the food. Beth has a limoncello spritz and Steve has red wine. Along with the drinks come with bite sized pieces of different flavors of pizza.

We end up the day with, of course, more gelato. The street in front of the gelateria we had chosen for tonight was very crowded with lots of police and Steve suspected that we were along the Olympic torch route for the evening as it headed toward the Duomo. Sure enough, while we were ordering our gelato, the torch went by! The perfect end for a very good day. We are happing to just go back to the hotel and go to sleep.

Tomorrow, we have the Opening Ceremonies in the evening so the blog will probably not arrive until the following day. Enjoy!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day -3,-2 (Cupertino to Milan)

 February 3-4

This will have to be a quick post at the end of two really short days crammed together to make what feels like one really long day. Our alarm went off at 4 AM and gave us just enough time to take quick showers, pack our toiletries and get picked up by our Uber to San Francisco International. Bay Area traffic is funny. We knew we would be way early to the airport, but if we had waited another hour, we would have arrived two hours later. But this was okay. It gave the TSA workers plenty of time to examine the 700+ Olympic lapel pins that Steve is bringing (with the goal of giving at least 10 away per day).

Other than some pretty severe turbulence going over the Rocky Mountains, the flight from San Francisco to Montreal was uneventful. We had a 3 hr layover which gave us time to grab a light meal before we boarded our flight to Milano. As soon as we saw the plane, we knew that this going to be interesting:

It seemed likely that a plane with the Canadian Olympic Association logo on it was going to have some Olympic athletes on board. Sure enough, they started arriving shortly after we sat down. Although we have watched a lot of speed skating (both short- and long-track) and bobsleigh, we didn’t recognize anyone. Many had ski boots and we guessed that they might be freestyle skiers. We also saw the only member of the Jamaican alpine skiing team (all the other Jamaican Olympians are bobsledders) and forty Canadian athletes (the announced number- we think that’s a lot but nearly the entire men’s and women’s Italian hockey team are based in Canada)  who will be representing Italy in Milano-Cortina. Several people noticed the pins on Steve’s hat, a few took pictures and one guy, who is the coach of the sole Eritrean alpine skier, gave Steve one of their team pins!

Before boarding, the gate agents announced that as one of Team Canada’s official sponsors, they were thrilled to be transporting a number of Olympic athletes and coaches and invited them to board ahead of everyone else. The crowd gave them an enthusiastic cheer.

As we boarded, what had been light flurries turned to heavier snow and we could tell that our plane was going to take a tour of the de-icing station before we took off:

While we were waiting, we found ourselves sitting behind a Canadian woman who was carrying her Team Italy hockey jersey. There were also a group of people next to us that seemed to be families of athletes.

The flight itself was uneventful. Neither of us slept more than an hour or two as we flew over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on this side of the Atlantic and Cork in Ireland and Land’s End in England on the other side. We continued down across Brittany and across France, over the Alps near Geneva and down into a very rainy Italy.

Milano’s main airport is called Malpensa which my Duolingo Italian says could reasonably be translated as “bad idea”. If so, it could be considered a bad idea for being so far from the city. After clearing customs and getting our bags, we take a 45 min train ride to the Milano Centrale station. Here is a picture of some of the art in this old time station:

Check-in at our hotel isn’t until 2 PM so we stop in the train station for lunch (panini sandwiches and some badly needed caffeine - Coke Zero) before getting an Uber to the hotel.

The hotel is a boutique hotel in a neighborhood called Navigli somewhat to the southwest of the city center. We are still working on figuring out how many rooms there are (less than 30 seems likely).

When we unpack, Steve realizes he is missing the charging cable for his laptop so he is writing this on his phone. We’ll have to do something about this when it is not raining and we are less sleep deprived. But for now, we spent some time walking around the area, finding the Metro station nearest us and buying 3 day passes (the longest time they will sell), and end up having gelato for dinner!

Tomorrow, we are off to Women’s Ice Hockey. Stay tuned!

Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games - Olympic Day -7 (Cupertino)

 January 30th

My name is Steve and I'm an Olympiholic. While that sounds like I should be in some sort of 12-step program, I have nothing but positive things to say about my Olympic obsession and have no interest in giving it up. The 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Milano-Cortina will be the 15th Olympic Games that my wife Beth and I have attended, beginning (gulp)46 years ago at the Lake Place 1980 Winter Olympics.

If you are new to these blogs, welcome! If you have read my previous Olympic (or other) blogs, welcome back. I will try not to be redundant. Either way, my goal with these blogs is to give you an idea of what it is like to be an Olympic spectator. We are now four days out from our departure for Milano, so I thought I would take some time to give you an idea of the planning that has gone into getting us where we are now. Our past experience always involves the same steps in the same order: buy tickets, buy plane and other transportation tickets, find other things to do in the host city, and finally, find a place to stay. Let's take those steps one at a time.

In November 2024, we signed up on the Milano-Cortina 2026 website for a drawing for having the first chance at buying tickets. In January 2025, we received an email from the organizing committee telling us that we would get an email between February 5 and February 20 telling us when our timeslot would be to initially buy tickets. There would be many more opportunities to buy tickets as time went on, but we were hoping for one of the earlier time slots in order to have more choices. We eventually got an email indicating that our time slot would start at 10 AM central European time on February 7th and last for 48 hours. 10 AM central European time is 1 AM here in California so that wasn't very convenient, but I'm an Olympiholic, so I woke up to be one of the first in line. Despite that, there was still a 25-minute queue to get into the ticketing website. The rules are that one person can only purchase 30 tickets in order to prevent ticketing resellers from buying up all of the prime tickets, so Beth also created an account that I used to log in about a week later to buy more tickets.

There were surprisingly few tickets to marquee events like Women's figure skating, but Beth and I are pretty non-denominational when it comes to what events we see. Over the years, we've had great times at almost any events we've gone to no matter what the sport. Over the course of the next six months, we purchased tickets to 17 events:

    February 5 - Women's Ice Hockey France vs Japan
    February 6 - Opening Ceremonies
    February 7 - Women's 3000m speed skating
    February 8 - Women's Ice Hockey France vs Sweden
    February 10 - Women's 500m, Men's 1000m & mixed relay short track speed skating
    February 11 - Men's Ice Hockey Slovakia vs Finland
    February 12 - Men's Ice Hockey Czechia vs Canada
    February 13 - Men's Ice Hockey Italy vs Slovakia
    February 14 - Women's Skeleton Heats 3 and 4
    February 15 - Women's Monobob Heats 1 and 2
    February 16 - Women's Curling Round Robin
    February 16 - Men's Curling Round Robin
    February 17 - Women's Curling Round Robin
    February 18 - Men's Curling Round Robin
    February 19 - Men's Curling Semi Finals
    February 20 - Women's Two-Women Bobsled Heats 1 and 2
    February 21 - Women's 12.5 Km Biathlon Mass Start

Note that we didn't know who would be playing in the ice hockey games when we bought the tickets. It was just the luck of the draw. We also discovered that we had accidentally purchased two sets of Curling tickets that overlapped with the Monobob event, but we were able to sell these tickets at face value on the resale site that the organizing committee operates. For the most part, we have tried to limit our tickets to one event per day so that we have plenty of time for sightseeing. But it does not appear that the Italian people are buying up tickets at the rate that was projected and we believe that we will have plenty of options to buy additional event tickets once we are in Italy if we choose to.

With tickets out of the way, it was time to work on transportation. We can't fly directly from San Francisco to Milano, so we have to change planes in places like London or Rome. San Francisco to London is 11 hr, 14 min while San Francisco to Rome is 12 hr, 10 min. This was a little too long to spend stuck in a typically cramped economy-class seat, so we decided to split the trip in half by going from San Francisco to Montreal in the morning, having dinner during our layover and then flying directly to Milano, arriving there in the morning of the following day.

Milano-Cortina will be one of the most spread out Olympic games ever! We had taken a look at in-country transportation and found that it is a royal pain to get from Milano to Cortina. It is only 160 miles between the two as the crow flies, but as in the old Maine joke, "you can't get there from here".  It is 255 miles to drive and an almost 4 hr trip by high-speed train to Venice and low-speed train to Ponte nelle Alpi-Polpet followed by a 30-ish minute bus ride to Cortina. There was just no way that we would want to stay in Milano and do this twice in a day to see any of the events in Cortina. Since there are events near Cortina that we really want to see (Bobsled, Skeleton, Curling, Biathlon) we decided that we would break our trip into two parts - Feb 4-14 in Milano and Feb 14-22 in Cortina. Finally, since Venice is quite close to Cortina, we decided to spend a 3-day "weekend" in Venice after the Games are over. The airline options from Venice are more limited so we can't break up the long flight and will instead fly Venice to London and then have a long flight from London to San Francisco. Since we are traveling in the same direction as the sun, we leave Venice around 11 AM and arrive in San Francisco at about 6 PM of the same day. With the logistics decided, we booked our flights about six months ago and our train tickets about 2 months ago.

We have clear divisions of labor while working on planning. I work on event tickets and some of the transportation tickets while Beth works on housing and finding interesting non-event things for us to do. For Milano, the things that require tickets are seeing Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and a tour of the Duomo - the huge gothic cathedral in the center of Milano. Beth also has a long list of other things to do in case we have time, such as an exhibition on 3,000 years of the Olympics, that don't require advanced ticketing. At the same time, she made reservations for the two places in Venice that require advanced ticketing: the Doge Palace and St. Mark's basilica. About the only thing that requires advanced tickets in Cortina is a ride up the Gondola which we have, so far, decided to pass on.

Finally, it was time to deal with housing. Throughout our Olympic adventures there has been a pattern to housing. A couple of years out, the Olympic family (International Olympic Committee, the National Olympic Committees, sports federations, broadcast media and families of potential Olympic athletes) reserve all the hotel rooms in the city and there is no availability for the rest of us. Of course, if you have stupid amounts of money, it is always possible to reserve rooms at multi-thousands of dollars per night. Seeing the high housing costs, every Airbnb host jacks up their prices in the hopes of paying a year's worth of mortgage in a few weeks. So, we wait. Eventually, all of the Olympic family people start to sort out how many rooms they actually need and begin cancelling their reservations. Hotels, which thought that they were completely booked out are now half full and cut their prices. Those price cuts trigger corresponding cuts from the Airbnb people and the whole thing becomes a game of chicken where the longer you wait, the less you pay. This process has happened at every Olympics we've gone to - until now. The first problem was Cortina. The population of Cortina is only about 7,000 in the summer and 40,000 in the winter so there aren't too many hotels or Airbnb's. Two months before the Games, there were still very few rooms and hotel prices were all multi-thousands of dollars per night. We could have found cheaper housing by booking a hotel in one of the many small towns between Cortina and the Ponte nelle Alpi-Polpet train station, but that would have meant spending unknown hours per day on buses going from the hotel to the Olympic venues - something we really wanted to avoid if we could. We finally settled on an Airbnb in Cortina that is a studio apartment with a sofa bed for a mere $500/night. By far, the most we have ever paid for Olympic housing! But the upside is that we are within walking distance of both the sliding center (skeleton, bobsled) and curling stadium. Booking a hotel in Venice was no problem as it is the off season there and we found a nice place right near the grand canal. This left us to deal with Milano. We watched hotel prices literally for months. There was plenty of availability, but prices remained stubbornly high. I really wonder if the hotels are using some sort of AI to set prices instead of panicking when they have a bunch of rooms become available. In any case, we waited until about three weeks before we were scheduled to leave to book a nice hotel in the Navigli neighborhood of Milano, to the southwest of the Duomo, for a little over $300/night - at least it comes with a free breakfast and is a short walk from the nearest subway station!

With preparations out of the way, we can spend our last couple of days at home focusing on the really important stuff like setting up our video system to record all of the many, many Olympic events we will miss while we are gone, and figuring out how to bring enough clothes to be comfortable from sub-zero to 50F in rain/snow and everything in-between without bringing such large suitcases that they are a pain to schlep on taxis, buses, trains and perhaps water taxis. We'll check back in on Tuesday (February 4th) as we set out on this adventure. Stay tuned!

Indochina Express - Day 23 (Bangkok to Cupertino)

March 25

After 23 days, it is time to head home. We enjoy one more breakfast on the river and then Yokie and our driver pick us up for the ride to the airport. It is only mid-day in Bangkok, so traffic is not very heavy, and we get to the airport with a lot of time to spare. We get one more picture with Yokie:

and then head through security. We have plenty of time to do some shopping and get rid of some of our remaining Thai money. We don't see any stores that sell Thai art that we could fit in our carry-on bags, but we do visit a store selling gold jewelry. I'm lucky to get Beth (who never spends anything on herself) to buy a pair of nice gold earrings because she didn't do the Bhat to Dollar calculation correctly and thought that they cost much less than they actually did! We also buy a couple of bags of cashew nuts as Thailand is one of the biggest producers of these nuts and the cost is much lower than we can get at home.

Finally, we all board our flight to Taipei, Taiwan where Chris and Mark will connect with a flight to Toronto while we head on to San Francisco. Since we lost a day going west, now we get it back. Beth and I will arrive in San Francisco only four hours after we leave Bangkok even though we will spend nearly 16 hours in transit. The good news is that traveling east, we will have a tail wind for most of our trip which will cut our travel time by perhaps two hours compared with going west.

The first flight lands in Taipei in the late afternoon. One of the advantages of flying business class is that we get to kill time in the "VIP" lounge. We have some dim sum and caffeine and think about our strategy of when to sleep on our flights to minimize jet lag. Finally, it is time for Chris and Mark to board their flight, and we walk with them to their gate. One of the interesting things about the Taipei airport is that the international terminal gates are on two levels: you show your boarding passes/passports on the upper level and then board the flight from the lower level. Each of the upper gates has a theme. Chris and Mark's gate looks like a city park with trees and park benches to sit at while waiting. We say goodbye and ask them to think about where in the world they would like to go next and then head off to our gate which is laid out like a lunch place outside a train station.

Once on the plane and in the air, of course they feed us, which gives us something to do for an hour or so. My vaguely Chinese dinner looks better than it tastes (maybe I've adapted to the spicy food we've eaten during our trip). After dinner, I decide to go with the "do what you would do in the time zone that you are traveling to" strategy while Beth decides that she is not tired and will just stay awake reading the whole flight. Since it is now very early morning in California, I try to go to sleep. But after a couple of hours of unsuccessfully trying to get to sleep, I decide to read a while, watch where we are on the globe for a while, and play some of the games on the video display for a while. We arrive in San Francisco a little early and Uber home. It has been a great trip!

To everyone who has been reading this blog, I hope that you have enjoyed it. We strongly recommend travel to this part of the world! I'm sorry that it has taken a month after we returned home to complete it, but I had over a thousand photos that needed editing. If there are things that I could have done better, please leave me a comment and I will try to incorporate them into future blogs. Speaking of which, my next blog will probably be for our trip to Milan and Cortina, Italy for the Winter Olympics in February 2026. I hope that you will join us for this adventure!

Indochina Express - Day 22 (Bangkok)

March 24

Well, we've reached our last full day in Asia. I think we've reached the sweet spot between "we didn't see enough after coming all this way" and "I'm worn out and just want this trip to be over". We are picked up at 9 AM at our hotel's dock by a long-tailed boat:

I'm not sure why they call them that because this is clearly a big-nosed boat with a very long prow. But maybe it is because the propeller is at the end of a very long rod.

We ride along the Chao Phraya River until we come almost to Wat Arun. We pass a number of boats and a Navy base before we turn onto the Thonburi canal:

We go through a lock into the canal itself. There are a lot of other long-tailed boats going in both directions, so this form of excursion is clearly popular with the tourists. It is a little weird flying along in this boat (which has a serious engine) through what are essentially people's backyards. Many of the homes we see have small shrines in the backyard to honor their ancestors. But there are also a lot of little shops. We stop at one for tea, to feed the local catfish and to look at knick-knacks:

After this stop, we pass an area with a lot of shrines. Since Thonburi was once the capital of Siam, this is not a surprise. We stop at a couple of them, including a huge temple with a big Buddha that is under reconstruction. Yokie tells us that this is a very prosperous temple and is important for training monks. Many patrons have donated their personal artifacts to make a small museum. We see everything from Chinese Ming-style pottery to Motorola flip phones. Upstairs is a fancy jade-colored stupa. Here are some pictures:

Shortly after we get back in our boat, we are approached by a woman in a smaller boat crammed with stuff to sell to foreigners that she encounters along the canal. But rather than trying to sell us anything, she takes out a machete, cuts the top off of four coconuts and hands them to us. Then she hands us a huge gift basket filled with flowers, fruit and a bottle of wine from our travel agent:

What a surprise! We stop for lunch at a restaurant/farm that grows its own organic fruits and veggies. The signs on the property explain that their ancestors have farmed the land in this neighborhood for more than 100 years and that this area was renowned for its fruit and gardens. But as the city encroached and the canal became polluted with factory runoff, most of the gardens and orchards died out. This family purchased an abandoned junkyard and have created a beautiful garden, but more importantly helped to reestablish the community that used to be here. All of the food is grown locally, and all of the employees live in the area. 

The food is delicious. We try a few different things including a peanut/coconut/coconut milk mixture that is served on two types of leaf with a piece of tomato. The staff also cuts up some of the fruit in our gift basket and we drink the wine along with our meal. There is too much fruit in the gift basket for us to eat before we go home and we can't bring it into either the US or Canada, so we send the rest home with Yokie. Here are a couple of pictures: 

We are supposed to go back to the hotel the way that we came, but Yokie thinks that it will be too hot on the water. So, she sends the long-tailed boat away and arranges for two taxis with air conditioning to bring us back to the hotel. Given the goal of the restaurant, it is fitting that Yokie, Beth and I get a taxi that is an electric vehicle! We have a good time discussing EVs with the driver on the 45-minute ride back to the hotel.

For dinner, we go to a restaurant on the river that we discovered during our walk the previous evening, and yes, we did have one more mango sticky rice! After dinner, we go across the street to the night market to try to get rid of most of our foreign currency. I know that it is customary to haggle, but when I ask one vendor how much the Thailand National Football (Soccer) Team jersey is, he says 250 bhat. That's only US $10 so it doesn't seem right to haggle for something that would cost $50-75 at home. Next, we find a place that has small wooden demons like you would find in a temple:

Our son Sean wanted some art from our trip. We see two we like. One would be perfect for Sean, and the other one would go well with our collection of carved masks from previous trips. The vendor quotes us 900 Bhat for one and 850 Bhat for the other. I look in my wallet, but after buying the soccer jersey, we don't have enough cash. He takes credit cards, but this would still leave us with cash we don't want to bring home so I tell him thanks, but no thanks. He immediately drops the price to 800 Bhat for each one and says that he will go to 1550 Bhat for both. I'm sure that he would have gone lower, but again, this is only US $62, so we agree to the price - a good ending to a great day!

Indochina Express - Day 21 (Bangkok)

March 23rd

Our first stop for the day is the Golden Mountain (easier to say than "Wat Sraket Rajavaramahavihara"). There are 344 miniature steps (that I took 2 or 3 at a time) leading to a great view of the city. This temple was originally constructed when Ayutthaya was still the Thai (Siam) capital but was expanded by Rama I through Rama III. This mountain is actually the ruins of an older huge temple built by Rama II that collapsed during construction. Rama IV built a stupa on top which now holds some of the ashes of Buddha brought here from Sri Lanka.  One other interesting thing about this temple - between the reigns of Rama I and Rama III, it was the custom to not allow cremation inside the city walls because it was thought to be bad karma. This became a problem during the reign of Rama II when there were a series of huge cholera outbreaks in Bangkok. An estimated 30,000 people died and were removed here because it was the closest site to the one city gate used to move bodies for cremation. They could not cremate bodies fast enough, so this area became a food court for the vultures in the area. Here are some pictures:

Our next stop is a trip to the flower market to get offerings for our stop after lunch. We learn how to fold lotus flowers and Beth and Chris get jasmine garlands. We stop to have tea at a very nice cafe in the flower district with a mirror that says, "Just living is not enough, one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower". They have dried flowers hanging almost everywhere giving a feeling of having lunch in the garden. Here are a couple of pictures of the flower market:

The main stop for the afternoon is a trip to the Grand Palace. And it really is grand! It was home to the Kings of Siam (and later, Thailand) from 1782 until 1925 when King Rama IX moved to other nearby quarters. A lot of the material was taken from the destroyed city of Ayutthaya after the war with Burma. It is still used for official events, like entertaining visiting heads of state, today. There is a lot of bling here, but what surprised me the most is that it contains a to-scale model of Ankor Wat! Apparently, Rama IV ordered that Angkor Wat be moved to Bangkok to show Thai domination of Cambodia, but the project never really got off the ground (imaging moving all of that stone by hand and elephant) and since the King didn't want to back down, he later ordered a model of it to be built in the Grand Palace. But the key part is the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. There are a lot of stories about the Emerald Buddha (which was carved from a 26-inch piece of emerald!), but it is believed to have been created by the sage Nagasena in what is now Patna, India around 43 BCE. Later, it moved to Sri Lanka to avoid a civil war and from there, on to Angkor Wat. When the Thais attacked Cambodia in 1452, they took it to Ayutthaya and later to Laos and then to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand until it was found in 1434 and moved to Lampang and again to Chiang Mai. It stayed there until 1552 when it was taken first to Luang Prabang, Laos and later moved to Vientiane, Laos when the King moved the capital after a series of Burmese attacks. In 1779, the Thais invaded Laos and took it to the Thai capital of Thonburi across the river from Bangkok and later moved it to the Grand Palace by King Rama I when he moved the capital. That's a well-traveled Buddha! Chris and Beth make their flower offerings, and we sit for a few minutes contemplating and cooling off. Here are some pictures:

After a couple of hours being roasted, we head for lunch at a rooftop restaurant with a great view of the former Thai capital and Wat Arun on the other side of the river. It is great to eat good food and enjoy the air conditioning! And yet again, we have mango sticky rice for desert although this version was quite different with the mango and sticky rice in a bowl sort of like a waffle. Here are a couple of pictures:

We have a variety of choices for the early afternoon, but we choose visiting a shopping mall in the new city (primarily for the AC!). This mall comes with a history. When the shopping center was under construction, they had a lot of problems (injuries, construction problems, etc.) so they consulted a monk who said that they should erect a Buddha on the property in order to chase away the evil spirits. So now there is a small four faces of Buddha temple on a corner next to the mall. Here are a couple of pictures:

Many people come with offerings of flowers or money, and there is a group of women in old Thai outfits that dance as part of certain offerings, but we catch them during a break. Inside, the mall is quite busy, although perhaps it is the locals just getting out of the midday heat. We hoped to find stores that are unique to Thailand, but most of the stores are the same as we would find at an upscale mall in California. After some effort in getting through the traffic, our driver picks us up and brings us back to the hotel for a brief rest before going out for dinner.

Dinner is on our own tonight, but we are still stuffed, so we elect to have some wine, appetizers and dessert at the hotel's rooftop bar overlooking the river. After dinner, we take a walk along the river to a park and then on to the night market across the street. Beth and I did not bring our money with us so we identify a couple of things we might like to buy tomorrow and head back to the hotel while Chris and Mark continue to check out the night market.