A great day in Thailand

Yesterday was a great day for us and has changed our point of view slightly from Dean's last post. We decided to go over budget (which we've pretty much done every day so far..oops) and we booked ourselves a tour out of the city center. It started at 7 am as we boarded an air conditioned bus (won't do anything if it doesn't have air conditioning) and headed..well not to sure...I think we went south! Firstly we went to a floating market that was jammed packed with tourists. The boat could barely move through but we enjoyed it anyways. Dean is getting really good at bargaining and we bought some great food and a fan. From the floating market we went to Jeath's Museum which is where the Japenese used prisoners of war to build train tracks to get into Burma. We decided to save ourselves the 80 baht to actually get into the museum and instead chose to walk on the train tracks and take our own pictures. There we saw a very sick elephant tied up. It was quite sad. Dean fed it 2 banana's, it seemed to be starving. Our next stop was the best. We both thought of you Marty and both wished that we could have shared this with you. We went to a tiger restoration area. Here we got to sit and pet and get our pictures taken with full sized (not tamed) Tigers! It was so awesome!! The staff guided us through (while holding our hands) and let us pose with the HUGE tigers. I got whipped with the tail of the biggest one right after I was told not to touch it. It scared the crap out of me. It was a powerful whip! We also got to play with baby tigers. They were adorable. We've taken lots of pictures and Dean is going to post some hopefully today!!! After we got back into town. We went for dinner. We actually spent the evening with our first backpacker friend Marissa. (We met her on the tour) Dean had a whole fish for dinner. Head, Tail and all!! He definetly blew our budget for dinner..it cost him 300 baht...which is..approx $11..yikes!! From there we decided heck, we'd already spent so much money that day why not a little more and we did one of the best things.....Thai massages!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is true..you can't get a better massage than the ones in Thailand. Dean was certain he probably could have gotten a massage with benefits...but decided not to jump at the opportunity!!! (which I was grateful for) We will definetly invest in another one before we leave here. Today is gonna be another hot day (yesterday at the market we had a little bit of rain...it was refreshing) We are probably going to go to Chinatown. Tommorrow we will go to the Grand Palace and to see the giant reclining Buddha. We will then board an over night train and head south for a few days on the islands! We've found the Thai people to be extremely friendly and even if they don't speak good english they make an effort. Everyone (at least in the city) wants to sell you something. When you say no they always offer a discount price and from there is where you start to negotiate! But on Khao San Road there is so many tourists, that they don't seem to care if you buy or not. The food has proven to be delicious! In fact, shortly after finishing a meal we are already thinking about the next so that we can try something else. We have yet to try something that we didn't like...so much for our travelling weight loss plan! It feels like we've been here for a really long time already and we both are finding it hard to believe that we still have well over 2 and a half months left.... Feel free to comment on our blog (or at least say HI) We would love to hear from everyone!