Our long-awaited Bangkok trip finally happened and we were there from 8th till 12th December. 5 days would have been a lot, if we had better flight timings. But since we got this Bangkok trip from a deal website, there were little flight timings we could choose from. So we had to settle with reaching Bangkok on Thursday evening and leaving on Monday early afternoon.
So we met at the airport on Thursday afternoon and flew off for the land of smiles on Thai airways!
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| Thai airways |
We thought we would get personal screens on the plane but, guess it was an old plane or something, no personal screens :( But instead they showed us some sort of live footage from a camera placed in front of the plane, quite cool stuff.
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| P2 Boutique Hotel, "the new hotel in Bangkok" |
Here's our hotel, quite new and clean, as seen from the photos below. The hotel is pretty near Platinum mall too - walkable distance, which we realized only on the last day. Why only on the last day? We HAD to walk to platinum that day, because we had very very little money left haha.
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| TV was placed at a really weird place |
After checking in at the hotel, we left for the tailor's at Nana. We chose Jhasper fashion, which was a surprisingly small shop manned by an Indian couple who were born in Thailand. They were very nice people and explained every single detail to us very patiently, not sure if it was because we were paying customers. They even recommended us this restaurant with apparently good thai food, but we didn't go for it - too expensive.
Cabbed back to our hotel area and none of us had the map to our hotel, it took the cab driver quite some time to understand where our hotel was, but he managed to get the location right in the end.
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| Dinner on the first night |
There were lots of roadside stalls near our hotel so we decided to walk around and look for food! The roadside food were kinda dirty but we didn't really care and ate roadside food for almost the whole trip. Had some prata-like thing from the uncle above (who was damn unhygienic), noodle soup and mango sticky rice. I like the noodle thing so much that I bought 2 packets of it back home haha, not sure if I'm ever going to cook them though.
At night, we went for our first thai massage at this 24-hour massage parlour near our hotel. The room for the full body massage looked kinda sleazy, it was just a dark room with mattresses and pillows inside. I don't know what made it look so dodgy, maybe the place just looked cheap. But the massage was really good - painfully shiok. My muscles were seriously aching from the hockey training on Wednesday and this massage was just godsend.
Day 2, we got awakened by a 6am morning call from the front desk because we had to meet at 7plus for our half-day tour from the agency. Ate the hotel breakfast (which kinda sucks) and left on a small van for our tour!
On the van, the guide was spamming us with random thai facts. He said that for the thai language, girls generally end their speech with an opened mouth while guys do so with a closed mouth; key thing for distinguishing females from males. Another thing he told us was that for thais, they believe in 5 qualities that separates humans from animals. I don't really remember what those 5 things were, but there were probably things like no cheating on your wife and no alcohol. Stuff that don't really match our impressions of Bangkok.
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| Recycled sandbags as Christmas tree! |
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| Boat we will be taking |
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| Excited for our floating market! |
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| Some temple we stopped at |
Nothing interesting here, except that I bought a coconut and it was really nice. Rabbit and bee posed for some photos at one of those stand-up cardboard signs with a hole for you to fit your head in, and had to pay 40 baht. There was this sign below it saying "40 baht" and none of us spotted it before we snapped the picture. And the woman didn't allow us to delete the photo either. Well, at least she didn't wait for us to snap more picture with the cardboard things before asking for more money!
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| And this was the so-called floating market -.- |
On the boat ride back to some jetty/harbor, the guide told us to go "meow" if we want to say no to local thais. On my way off the boat, I somehow managed to slip and fall. Thankfully I didn't fall into the river, but I got a minor wound and some unsightly bruises at the back of my knee. Anyway, the half day tour was kind of like a cheat, many places they listed out, like the floating market and the four-faced buddha weren't really visited in proper i.e. we kinda just drove past the four-faced buddha and the floating market was like, 3 boats? We spent a lot of time at a temple, the jewellery factory and some honey factory though.
After all that sight-seeing, we headed off to platinum mall for some serious shopping. The clothes there were so-so, some were of better quality while most of them were bugis-street-quality. Prices were around 200-300 baht per piece, that place wasn't very friendly for price-hagglers. The people just weren't interested in haggling with us, or even chasing after us for sales. Maybe we need to improve our bargaining skills?
After all that shopping, we went for our Mambo show! After we sat down at our seats, I started to regret a little, maybe we should have went for the thai girls show? This one might be tame enough, but what if it was boring? The whole performance was just dancing, lip-syncing and all but it was surprisingly entertaining. By the end of the performance we had nicknames for some of them already: "winky-winky" for this ladyboy who kept winking at every chance he got and "planet of the apes" for another one who looked really like an ape.
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| This really entertaining performer who kept making the audience laugh |
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| Winky-winky's boobs spilling out |
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| Super chio ladyboy! |
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| Winky-winky trying to seduce someone for the nth time |
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| That super chio ladyboy again! |
Whoa, our day very long hor! After the Mambo show, we went for another round of shopping and dinner at Patpong night market. We didn't do much shopping here, it's good that we didn't. The people here were quite rude and the prices were like freaking high. This is the only place in Bangkok where the vendors actively bargained with us and this is also the only place where we didn't buy anything at all! Around this area, we kept getting approached for thai girl shows.
Day 3: We dropped by the tailor's in the morning for fitting. Quality of the tailoring and everything else was satisfactory so far, I don't really know too much about the specifics but as long as it's visually okay, I'm happy :D The tailors were as friendly as ever and educated us a bit about the different shopping centres.
After the tailor's, we went to pratunam mall. Lots of black skirts, auntie clothes and weird random stuffs selling there. Needless to say, we left that place for platinum mall after about 15 minutes.
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| Bottom left: ladyboy show clothes. The rest: auntie clothes that even my mum won't wear. |
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We crossed the road to World Centre after that for the big C supermarket.
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| Bangkok's traffic |
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| Plenty of water in the supermarket |
Went over to MBK after that for some shopping and food. We ate at MK suki yaki, our first proper meal in days and went off for some manicure/pedicure. ALL OF US did nails at a shop we randomly chose and that place was a serious waste of our money. If the service was better I would have been less pissed off about that place, but they didn't have proper equipment/enough nail polishes and the person who did my nails was really terrible. No base coat until I asked for it and she was pretending not to know what a base coat was, like hello, you know how to tell me that you think I need a 200baht foot scrub and you don't know what a base coat is? She barely trimmed my cuticles too, good job. I could have done it myself man. I was asking for OPI and she had the nerve to tell me that OPI is "same same" as those cheapo bottles of nail polishes she was showing me. Rargh. But okay, I guess the most pissed off person should be the owner of the foot below who spent 400baht for almost nothing. Heheh poor thing.
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| Bloody pedi aftermath |
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| Lunar eclipse! |
After the shops in MBK started closing, we went to shop at the roadside stalls instead. These roadside stalls seriously stretch on and on. We were too tired to cover the whole stretch (and I doubt we have the time to anyway) and we cabbed back to our hotel after that.
Massage that night was slightly different from the first night's (we went to a different place), the masseuse didn't use as much strength and the place was less dodgy looking.
Day 4: CHATUCHAK DAY! Didn't really do much shopping because by now, I have already bought what I want and have no more money left for random clothes shopping, sadly. The vendors here, somehow, doesn't seem very interested in bargaining with us too. Must be all those ang mohs who agree on higher prices too readily ah.
After lots of shoe shopping, we started our hunt for the pets section in chatuchak. I can't really understand their map for tourists, either both me and kejun failed at map-reading, or their map was useless. We tried asking vendors for directions to the pets section, I think we asked about 5 or 6 vendors? Almost all of them told us to "go straight" and we ended up wandering all over the place. I think we covered almost the whole market (might be exaggerating) but we still couldn't find the pets section. One of the vendors even told us to go to section 20 and I was so grateful to her then, it sounded so promising after all the "go straight"s. BUT, she was wrong. We finally asked this old lady at this shop selling leashes and wow, she shocked me a little and taught me that not all thais speak poor english!
Me: Sorry... Pet shop where? Cat, dog?
She: (in a low voice with some heavy angmoh accent) You want to see the animals?
Me: (too stunned to talk, could only nod my head)
She: Walk down this row of shops and you'll see the section.
And that was how we finally found the pets section! It was within section 9.
After Chatuchak, we went to Platinum (again) before cabbing to Som Boon for our seafood dinner!
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| Walking everywhere now because we have no money |
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| Som Boon seafood restaurant |
Maybe our expectations for this place was too high, but the seafood was only so-so. Maybe we should have ordered some of their signature dishes too? But we were working with a rather tight budget so...
Walked from Som Boon till somewhere near Patpong before we cabbed to Platinum mall (no money). Shopped a little bit more at platinum mall and cabbed to Siam center area to shop more at the roadside stalls. By then, we were running dangerously low on cash.
Finally we cabbed back to the hotel and we didn't do massage today because, no money :(
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| What we bought. |
Last morning in Bangkok, the only thing I won't miss here is the horrible breakfast at the hotel, the persistent tuktuk drivers and the thai girl show touters. We collected our suits and left for the airport :(
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| Last bottle of Soya Milk in Bangkok |
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| Goodbye Bangkok :( |
Effects of flood:
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| Collapsed house
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| Collapsing house |
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| Sandbags outside some shops |
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| Temporary concrete structures |
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| More sandbags |
During our few days in Bangkok, we realized that decembers in Bangkok get quite chilly! Chatuchak wasn't even hot unless we walked directly under the sun. And it also doesn't rain at all during decembers! We really went at a good timing. Besides that, they have the king's photo everywhere as well, in front of random buildings. Speaking of random, they also have statues of deities placed outside malls, by the roads, by the river and basically every random corner of Bangkok. Lastly, all their dishes have very generous servings of bean sprouts. I don't know what's it with Bangkok and bean sprouts, but you can definiely find bean sprouts in every meal you order.
That's about it for Bangkok. If I were to visit this place again, I'll be sure to bring more money, go during a December and watch a thai girl show this time.
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