May 26th, 2006 - Floating Market

We took a tour to the Floating Market in Damean Sadouak about an hour and a half outside of the city. Although it was pretty unique, it wasn't quite everyone's picture purfect floating boats with fresh fruit and veggies circulating through the canals or in an open lagoon, most of it was in a warehouse on the edge of the canal and the authentic stalls only accesable by water were few and far between, not to mention tourist oriented. Since we'd been holding out our shopping until we reached BKK we finally let it go and bought tons of souvenirs and treasures for ourselves and maybe our families if we decide not to keep everything for ourselves! There's so much fun stuff and although we know we're paying the tourist rate and bargaining can be slightly draining and time consuming - time is the one thing that we have loads of because we needed a few days to process our visa applications into Vietnam. Tomorrow, we hit the biggest market of them all on the outskirts of the city to finish off whatever we missed today! Since I'm a stingy bastard I think I did pretty well my first 'real' bargaining experience, if only I had a better concept of what things were worth over here! We spent the evening at Patong night market and the red light district of BKK - although it had the potential to be very outrageous and XXX complete with Banana and Ping Pong shows, we both shyed away and ventured into a Gentlemans club for a drink, which doesn't even constitute a strip club, but was neat to people watch and try and decide if there was a 'Back' room...