First Day & Night in Bangkok!

Arriving in Bangkok!!!

After a rather long flight (left home 08:00, arrived 07:00) with a lay over in Paris and about 3 hours of sleep, we arrived in Bangkok early in the morning. We chose the most inefficient passport control line, which took about 45 min. We were the last ones collecting the bags from the belt, but quickly realized that our bags were not on the belt at all. Instead, there was a bag “bucket” with my name on it saying that I should contact staff (“oh no! This is not good…”, I thought). Apparently our luggage never left Amsterdam, but luckily made it to the next flight from Amsterdam directly to Bangkok. The women at the air France stand gave us two options: to have the luggage delivered directly to the hotel or to wait for 2 hours for the luggage to arrive with the KLM flight. We chose to wait. We wondered around the airport like zombies, had an incredibly expensive tom yam soup and vegetable soup (which we will definitely try to declare from Air France). Finally, when the bags arrived we spent almost an hour trying to figure out the cheapest way to get to our hotel, which was located ~10 min walk from fameus Khao San road. A mini taxi would cost about 600 BTH (=20 euros), which we thought was waaaaay too much! We quickly figured out to take the train/mmetro to Phaya Thai and then the bus. This only cost us 116 BTH (3.87 euro) for two. The train took about 30 min and the bus as well. The local busses became our favorite way to travel in Bangkok – well connected to my locations and much cheaper than taxi.

Amazing Bangkok! We're here!

We decided to hit the shops, as stores were closed in The Hague on Thursday before we left. I had no small bag, which was terribly inconvenient. On trips like these I want to carry our passports. We had figured out that busses were convenient and a cheap means of travel. We decided to go to the MBK mall and the other malls in that area. MBK was not as good as I had expected, the people selling there did not seem to care much if they sold their stuff or not. I got the feeling that the Thai are doing actually (financially) pretty well. Girls were dressed really nice and appeared to shop a lot, also in expensive stores. I guess the quality of life has improved a lot since I was here last. I could have been wearing my engagement ring and not have to dress “down”. People are better off than I had expected, but yea, we will see what Manila is like…

MBK was not that much of a success, fake stuff and almost the same stuff everywhere we went. We decided to hit the more expensive malls next door. These had way better stuff to offer and looked so nice, clean and people everywhere were so friendly. Especially to me! They all spoke Thai to me and ignored Jesus. Some people even looked at Jesus with suspicion and when we would ask for directions people would look at me and talk to me and not Jesus, even if he asked the question. The malls were nice but we were so exhausted from only a 3 hour sleep, so we finally decided to head back to our hostel. With no success in finding a bag, we headed back with a tuk-tuk. Which totally ripped us off and drove like a maniac.