Tiger Temple

Wat Luang Ta Bua Yanna Sampanno, but "Tiger Temple" is easier to say :) We went here during our 3 day weekend in Kanchanaburi for our anniversery. It's a Buddhist monastary that started taking in tiger cubs in the late 90's after their mothers were killed by poachers.


The monks hang out with the tigers and raise them from just babies, so they're used to being around humans. That combined with being nocturnal animals makes for a Kodak moment.








But for obviouse reasons, they were pretty stern about where and how we posed with the tigers.






This all might look a little familiar...it was one of the road blocks on the very first season of Amazing Race!


She looks frisky, but Haylie put her in her place!











The tigers were pretty cool, the monks looked a little bit nuts for doing it, but the craziest thing we saw was the power of milk over the feline species.

Erawan Falls

Stu decided to go all out for our first anniversary this past weekend. He flew us all the way around the world to Thailand and then to a city called Kanchanaburi. On the 23rd we went to Erawan Falls, which is a set of 7 levels of waterfalls.
It took about 45 minutes to climb all the way up, but each tier seemed to be better than the last!


We took this sign to heart. Some of you may remember Haylie's run in with some fierce monkeys who stole her coffee. Luckily we weren't carrying any caffeine this time.



As soon as we stepped in the water, these fish would come and suck on your feet. Haylie screamed, Stu made a face, but apparently it was supposed to clean your feet.


Somewhere along the trail, Stu took a wrong turn and ended up sliding most of the way down the waterfalls. Haylie was very concerned, but still managed to get some good pictures and video.


Erawan is a three headed white elephant from Hindu mythology, but these beautiful falls were clearly invented by the creativity of God.

Revelation

YUP! Pretty soon we get to put up pictures of the Great Wall. We found the cheapest tickets EVER to China during our 2 week holiday in October!!!!

Foreshadowing

Can you guess which one of these countries neither of us has gone to yet?!...

Saturday Night Lights

This is a bit of the night market by our apt. It starts coming alive around 5, and we can usually find something that looks like we would like to eat it :) It seems like everyone that lives within a 2 mile radius of the market comes here on Saturday night for the dinner event!
On our way home from work, we walk right by here and can see it picking up. Here's a small taste of what it's like.

China Town

Every city has its China town, and Bangkok is no exception. Stu and I made our way here a couple of weeks ago via boat. You can actually jump on a boat taxi about 20 minutes from our apt and get to A LOT of areas around town.

...but when we got off the boat we had to walk for a bit. What we found (or I guess didn't find) was that someone must have stolen all the street signs around China town. We walked until we saw this, which tells us way better than any street sign that we finally made it to China town :)

Ummm...steamy bread with hot dogs and sea weed??? Your guess is as good as ours.



Probably the funnest phone booth on the face of the planet! Pretty sure it's a secret door to some rich, Chinese business man's house.














This is the best Eastern "pharmacy " ever. Who knows what kind of prescriptions you can pick up here.

Siam Ocean World

When Haylie's Dad came to visit we went all out tourist :) Siam Ocean World is in down town Bangkok and has a collection of very interesting, large, rare, or just bazaar sea creatures.




This is a giant spider crab. It was at least 5 ft across. They had lobsters about the same size.













This tank was around 20 meters high! They had to have super special glass almost a foot thick for all the tanks because they hold so much water. There was so much to look at that it took us several hours to go through the place.













Lots of different star fish. This lady eventually convinced Haylie to hold the star fish until all its little feeler-feet came out. Weird/gross!







This is one of the many alien looking things we saw. It's a blind salamander. They said that this kind of salamander never grew out of its "tadpole" stage, so it lives the rest of its life with legs and fish tail. It also never develops eyes. There is just skin where the eyes should be.