Pattaya

Last Saturday, my friend Pinky took me on a day trip to Pattaya to visit the Ripley's Museum and see the floating market in town. I've been to Pattaya a few times before. Overall, the town has a little bit of a bad reputation of being dirty and way too heavily populated by Russian tourists, but it's only two hours from Bangkok, and has quite a few hidden gems that the tourists don't know about. Ripley's was fun, and after a seafood lunch overlooking the sea, we went to the Pattaya Floating Market.

Entering the center of the market, we came to a pavilion housing housing a shrine to Ganesh. To the left was an alcove with a shrine to Buddha, and to the right, Guanyin.

"I should pray", Pinky said, and purchased a silver tray with incense, a candle, two cups of water and a red liquid respectively, and a chrysanthemum garland, which she offered to the shrine. Then she got two pieces of silk, yellow for me and pink for her (luckily for someone with her name, she was born on a Tuesday!), which we tied around a post at the shrine.

Floating markets are quintessentially Thai. They always show up in the guidebooks as one of the top highlights of things not to miss. They are really fun! It was hot, but we got some coconut ice and walked around. The Pattaya Floating Market was actually kind of hard to get to without paying a driver 10X the usual cost to get there. Luckily, I was traveling with a Thai, and she could get us around on the city's public transportation songtaew network.

It was evening, and we headed back to Pattaya beach for dinner. We got kebabs from a street vendor, and as we sat on the boardwalk overlooking the sea, I thought about how Pattaya has grown on me. It's got plenty of nice places around, if you know where to look. The tourists spend their time in a few small areas, and the rest of the city belongs to the Thais. There are a lot of really great places that the visitors just don't know about. The best part is, Pattaya is only two hours and 99 baht away from Bangkok, and makes for a really fun and easy day trip.

Pattaya Beach