Bangkok:

January 12th, 2005 - January 18th, 2005

Greetings from Bangkok...

We arrived from Calcutta the other day - and surprise, our flight from India was a few hours late! The best part was that we flew 1 hour west to a small Indian city to drop off 60 monks who were on the flight and then we flew back 3 hours the other way to get to Bangkok...

But I must add that going to India first made arrival in Thailand a breeze... people are so friendly here compared to India and there is such a warm feeling about the place. We are really enjoying our time here and we have found a great place to stay at thanks to a recommendation from a friend. If you are interested, the place is called Suk 11 - www.suk11.com - and is located a bit out of the heart of the city, but on the sky train line so we can get just about anywhere in the city...

Wednesday night we just unwound after checking into our hostel. The place has a big open area on the ground floor where many people hang out and stuff. It is a friendly place and a much older crowd than that of Khao San Road, the "original" backpackers' hangout.

Thursday, our first day in Bangkok, was spent taking care of various issues. We had to get Visas arranged for Laos as well as booking an overnight trip from here to the Bridge on the River Kwai which we are leaving to tomorrow morning as well has an elephant trek and bamboo ride on the river. Following that, we wandered around town checking out our area. A few things differed from India; firstly, it as much hotter here than the last few weeks in India... it has been in the low 30's the last few days and that is fantastic... Also, people here are not aggressive at all compared to the Indians. A simple "no thanks" and they leave you alone, whereas in India we consumed 90% of our energy telling people to leave us alone.

One interesting part of our day took place around 6pm when we were walking thru the subway station. All of a sudden everyone froze in their tracks. It took us a second to notice, too, but we stopped as well. We then realized that the national anthem was playing on the station's loud speakers... they do this every day. It was so strange to see everything come to a standstill like that!

Our day concluded in a suit shop, of course, where I spent a little more than planned, but should end up with a few nice suits once they are complete... I had my second fitting today!

On Friday we returned to full tourist mode, taking the subway to the water and then going by public boat to the major attractions. On the boat we met a couple from Grand Prairie, Alberta of all places... turns out that they even knew a university friend of mine (what are the odds)! We avoided the usual scams around the major attractions ("This one is closed today, how about taking a taxi to this other place...") India has made us much wiser travellers!

We spent the rest of the day wandering and enjoying the fantastic street food including Pad Thai for less than $1 CDN... also, the fruit on the street is amazing. By the time we reached our hostel at night we had taken a public sky train, public boat, public bus, and public subway to get around town ... it was quite neat and Bangkok is an easy city to get around.

In the evening, Jess and I went to a movie. In Thailand you reserve seats; there is no free-for-all like back home. We had the top class seats and they were like leather recliners... it was fantastic. The one oddity was that we had to rise for the national anthem before the movie started (they are so patriotic here)... By the way, we saw "Meet the Fockers" and some parts were edited out - they still sensor a lot there!

Today was spent at the weekend market which is a massive maze of shops of all sorts on the edge of town. According to Lonely Planet you can get anything (including an elephant on order) and that pretty much proved to be true. Despite all the choices of stuff, we didn't buy too much b/c there was just too much to pick through. But it was fun...

We ended off tonight by watching Thai Boxing live at one of the stadiums in town. There were a few knockouts, but for the most part it was rather boring b/c there were no major fighters tonight...

That's about it for Bangkok to this point... like I mentioned, we are off to see the Bridge on the River Kwai tomorrow and staying overnight on a raft barge before coming back here for 2 more nights...

Tonight marks our last night in Bangkok... in total we had six nights here while spending all day Sunday / Sunday night / Monday in Kanchanaburi.

Today we saw a few more attractions in the city including Jim Thompson's house - he is credited with reviving the silk trade in Thailand (he was an American) but he went missing hiking in the Cameron Highlands in the middle of the 20th century and they have never found his remains. Several theories exist...

Afterwards, we took the Sky train to the main boat pier and ventured to Chinatown. Chinatown is a maze of narrow streets and alleyways where you can purchase just about anything - especially Hello Kitty stuff! Vendors sell all kinds of food - most which we didn't recognize. The smells and sounds are nice, but after a while it becomes claustrophobic in the narrow streets.

A few things about Bangkok I forgot to add... there are 7-11 stores everywhere. We even have two on our street. It is similar to Tim Horton's shops in Hamilton!

It is amazing how "westernized" Bangkok is, as you can get anything here that you can get back home, and more. They have all the brand names especially Diesel and Von Dutch. And of course, Gucci bags. Of the odd variety, I even saw a Queen's University Science faculty leather jacket for sale in the weekend market!

That is about it for our time here; it certainly was not enough. There is just so much to do - even doing nothing and just taking things in is a ton of fun. Bangkok would be on my highly recommended lists of cities along with Bruges and Barcelona to name a few (strange they all start with "B")...

And lastly, for everything India doesn't get about tourism, the Thai's seem to "get it" ... things are efficient here and it is a very user friendly city / country to get around.

We fly to Koh Samui in the morning and transfer via boat to Koh Pha-Ngan (home of the full moon parties) for 7 nights. It will be a nice break, I'm sure.

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