Hi everyone, I'm in Bangkok and it's as chaotic and frantic as I remember it. It's also very hot (for us, although the man who followed us down the street to find out why we were so white assured us it's actually quite cool) and we are still recovering from the trippy extra long day it took us to get to Bangkok. This involved waking at 3am in NZ, spending most of the day in Sydney, then taking a nine hour flight to Thailand. We didn't get to our hostel until 1am and were awake for well over 24 hours. Amazingly after only four hours sleep we were up at 7 the next morning and managed a pretty full on day before coming home for a rest before dinner, which ended up as a rest before breakfast.

We've wandered, bused, ferried and (after alot of negotiating) tuk-tuked around a fair amount of the city.We've found the actual wandering in many ways alot more interesting than the actual attractions, although the house-sized golden buddha we vistited this morning at Wat Po was impressive.There's alot to take in on the streets of Bangkok but our top five discoveries so far have been:

1. Cooly Fresh - this is the cheapest brand of water around at only 12B for 1.5 L. It would be fair to say we're a little obssessed. But why wouldn't we be - it's cool, refreshing, 'reverse osmosis, uv lighting' and it's name is fun to say. Try saying it. We're thinking we should be the face of their next marketing campaign. They probably don't have enough money to pay us, but we don't mind, we'll do it for free in exchange for more Cooly Fresh.

2.Corn - it's everywhere. much to my and Sylv's delight and Sarah's disgust. We just ate some salty buttery char-grilled corn on the cob from a street vendor as a post-dinner snack. I'm looking forward to buying a corn sundae from KFC or a corn pie from McDonald's (if you're not a corn fan, you can always buy broccoli pie).

3. People on the street - you just never know when they accost you whether they're trying to sell you something (although it was hard to pass up the two for one deals on wedding dresses) or helpfully point you in the right direction (it seems the only direction imaginable for a tourist in bangkok is the Grand Palace).

4. Tourism Authority of Thailand - we love these people. When we were wandering around hot, lost and exhausted by the railway station on Tuesday a woman from TAT appeared, took us to her air conditioned office, gave us bottled water and mandarins and helped us book cheap train tickets, accomodation and trekking in Chiang Mei.

5.T-shirts - cheap knock of t-shirts are everywhere at the markets on khao san rd. Alot of them are from the 'mister' range. They have all the usuals like 'mr happy' and 'little miss naughty' but our favourite is the more original 'mr jihad' (photos coming).