More about New Years Eve

Thought I might go into a bit more detail about NYE as it really was an experience. We left the hotel with a map and headed for the subway about a kilometer away. As we got closer to where it was to have been we started asking where it was. Most Thai's that we've run into have very little English. So people started pointing and we headed up stairs and down stairs and around corners and finally found it! Buy a token, tap the token on the turnstile and away we went. (Only found out on the way back we could have gotten seniors prices...half price but the cost was only $2.65 anyway. Soooo according to the map we should have gotten off the subway and walked straight ahead and reached the river. So we walked and walked and walked ( obviously the map wasn't very exact). The strap on Jan's thong broke so we looked in a few shops but couldn't find any shoes so Jan walked barefoot! We passed a Buddhist temple with some ceremony going on (and haven't been able to have anyone tell us what it was about) with about 10,000 people. They were all seated and there was string going everywhere and most people had a loop tied to their head.
We then started asking where the fireworks were on and got some very strange looks (even from some police) but we were definitely told at the hotel they were at the river. We finally found someone who could understand where we wanted to go and said it was at least two km away ( we had already walked an hour) so we flagged down a tuktuk. What a ride...we would never walk down the streets he took us but we felt safe in the tuktuk. Finally we arrived at River City and sure enough everyone was gathering! Very interesting that no where around us did anyone count down to midnight...and there was a big band playing right next to where we were standing. We had no idea of the time as neither of us had watches so assumed it was sometime around midnight when the fireworks started!