Thailand : Bangkok : Grand Palace, Wat Pho, Thai Puppetry, Patpong

Opinions change, I like Bangkok much more than I did a couple of days ago...I think I am getting used to the heat and the grime(!)
Having said that, we tried to sleep without a fan last night and lasted about 10 minutes.
Tuk tuks are the way forward. They're such comic vehicles, like glorious milkfloats. To me, they seem very Thailand with bright colours and a quirky shape, 3 tyres for swaying round corners and 3 lights set into hammered tin.
Yesterday we went to the Grand Palace (and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and Wat Pho.
The temples were stupendous, every surface covered with colour and light. The whole complex was flanked by giant statues with very stylised faces, and the whole outside wall painted with a mural of the Ramakien (the Thai Ramayana) in intricate detail.
The Ramakien is fun, with Hanuman the monkey king prancing all over it and turning into colossus whenever he feels like saving the world, like He-Man.
We saw a puppet show, the style was very over-the-top theatrical with drawn out voices and melodramatic movements. All the characters appearance is exactly the same whenever they appear, in the murals, in puppet form or as costume for dancing.
The puppet show was in a night bazaar, which itself was very odd. It was totally charmless, quite unlike the lil markets scattered around Bangkok with very sterile lil stalls.
The KhaoSan road is hilarious, the way street vendors try to get you to buy things..."Beer...Fuckin' Good, 'Innit?!"
The entire temple complex sparkles with different colours, topped with golden roofs. It reminds me of "Doors to Perception".
The buildings were all built with spires in the shape of the royal crown. The Thai crown is thin and pointed. The Cambodian crown in tall and fat (like the towers in Angkor). The complex obviously included some Cambodian crown shaped spires, to signify the supremacy of the Thais over the Cambodians...!
Wat Pho via a dried fish market selling every sort of dried fish in pungent quantity.
Wat Pho contained an immense reclining buddha. The contrast of the intricate decoration on the temple walls and the buddha's bed(?) and the buddha himself, all clean lines and shapes, was gorgeous.
As always, we ended up a gay bar, ROXY, in a gay area near Silom. We wanted to go and see some Thai Elvis and Tom Jones impersonators but it was another night. So we pushed past the people offering "Ping Pong Show"...girl pops ping pong ball from pussy...girl pulls fish from pussy...girl peels banana with pussy...guys and headed for a (slightly) quieter looking street and were given a spacious spot between some lesbians and some guys who kept spanking one another, where we watched the she-males go by....