Wat Pho and Ayutthaya

For some reason the weekend of May 18th to 20th everyone from campus 1 and 2 decided to stay in Bangkok. I'm not sure why people wanted to stay, but it was best for me because I was running a race on the Sunday.

On Friday night we decided to to just go hang out at Old Bar (local resto) it was fun to see everyone from both Campus one and two. After old bar everyone went out to another bar and I went to bed because I am a granny and it was past my bedtime.

The next morning we slept in (til 8!) and then went to the weekend market with the Brandon Practicum students (who are super cool). We spent 3 hours at the Chatuchak weekend market and I bought 2 pair or sunglasses, lol, everyone else bought tonnes of stuff because the market it is the biggest one you will ever see, which a booming 15,000 estimated amount of stores. I guess I was not in a shopping mood.

After Chatuchak we took the BTS-skytrain to the grand palace and Wat Pho. We decided to go visit the temple of the Reclining Buddha first. It was HUGE! I knew it was big, but I had no idea how big.

We did not end up returning to the Piya apartments until about 5 in the evening. 
That night, a large number of teachers were heading to a place called "Skybar". I unfortunately had to stay behind because I had to be awake at 4AM the next morning for the race. 

As I said, the next morning I was up at 4 to be picked up at 4:30. The race was a "quarter marathon" on a giant port in Bangkok. There were quite a few runners (maybe 400 or so) at this one. IT WAS ROUGH! about 2km in I knew I had started too fast, because I already wanted to stop. It was about 32 degrees and humid at 6am when the race started. As soon as the gun went off so did two super fast Ethiopian women. There was a Thai woman in from of me at the start who I passed right away, but at about the 3rd km she blew by me again, but I cased her for the rest of the time. She ended up finishing about 30 seconds ahead of me, not even looking tired. So I ended finishing 4th in my second race in Thailand, got another trophy and also won 2000 baht ($65CAD). You'll notice in the picture, I am the second tallest woman on the stage, I don't know if that will every happen again! My time wasn't great(45mins), but we couldn't find anyone with a garmin to actually confirm that it was actually 10.5km, I choose to believe it was more like 11k :). It was definitely the hardest 10k I've ever run, might even have been one of the hardest runs I have ever done, just because of the heat. The men's side winners were all from Kenya and super friendly/funny, as usual for Kenyans. They were telling me Bangkok is was hotter than where they are from(haha)!

By the time awards and everything was over, we got back to the apartments around 10am. Of course instead of going back to bed, I decided it would be a great idea to go out to the old capital city for the day. So myself and 2 other UofMers and Brandon girl hopped in a cab to the BTS, to the bus station where we took an hour bus ride to Ayutthaya. It was crazy. 

When we finally got to Ayutthaya, we found a tuktuk to drive us around for the day. We saw SO MANY RUINS, it was super cool. In Thailand, everyone is allowed to walk all over the ruins, I felt like I was going back in time. To be honest, the whole time I felt as though I was in the movie "The Jungle Book" and I actually watched it later that night (and now I am actually reading the book on my kobo). 

All in all, it was a great weekend, but not relaxing in the least. It was a rough way to start the next week. I was pretty exhausted -AND STIFF- to teach the next few days.

Ayutthaya was a fantastic day trip, but as you may be able to see the expression on my face in the pictures, it may not have been the best post race activity.