Bangkok.

so we finally made it out of Israel, flew to London, and then London to Bangkok on Qantas. Seriously, if you ever have the opportunity to fly Qantas, I highly recommend it.
We touched down in Bangkok, and were sort of instantly relaxed. Despite the humidity, and the famed grossness, we found our hostel, checked in and walked around a bit.
We found our vegetarian restaurant and got our first Pad Thai and Papaya Salad. Our first evening ended with some rough Thai massages.

We then spent Monday walking around and sightseeing in Bangkok. We were duly impressed by the Grand Palace and the palace of the Emerald Buddha, and the heat pretty much drained us of all desire to go on. So we took a public bus over to some malls, and were cooled off by some much needed aircon and a light drizzle.

We had a generally nice experience walking around and bargaining and drinking beer at the night market.

There are tons of Israeli backpackers here and they have set up travel centers that organize hiking trips and have free luggage storage and internet (that is where we are now). So we are going on one of their hiking trips (http://www.lametayel-thailand.com/; Red Brick Inn - Hiking Trip). If you didn't know otherwise you would think that Israel was an enormous country as it is the only one with centers serving its citizens. It definitely feels like we are taken care of .

The Israelis are definitely an interesteing phenomenon. I haven't found as many locals who speak Hebrew like I did in South America, but this is only the begining. The Israelis we have run into so far were young and out of the army, except for one older lady (early 60s) who is here with her husband for their 5th time.
We are pretty excited to get up to Chiang Mai and to get out of the city. We promise to upload some pics sometime soon.

Love.