A Weekend in Bangkok

Most of the volunteers took the opportunity of the three day weekend (all of our weekends as three day weeks... ah.. the life..) to travel to various places, but I elected to stick around Bangkok and get my bearings. Two of the other volunteers stayed as well, one because he has been sick and the other because he has a short time in Thailand and wanted to see the sights of Bangkok.

Transportation options abound in Bangkok. You can take a taxi to the river, a boat across the river and a tuk-tuk to your destination. Or you can take a bus or a motorcycle taxi or walk. Once in the city, you can take to subway or the skytrain. We decided to walk to the river, take a ferry across and then a cab from there (the cabs here are really cheap with the initial fare starting at 37 bhat - 1 dollar - and most rides being under $2 (unless you have a long way to go)). Our first stop was the forensic museum in the local hospital, which is home to be preserved body of Thailand's first serial killer. Unfortunately, it is closed on Saturdays. From there we headed to the river and across with our ultimate destination being Siam Square, home of two of the biggest malls I have ever seen. Six story malls; where you can purchase t-shirts for 3000 bhat (about $100 dollars!). Neither of us being mall people, we didn't spend too much time there, but it was interesting to see. There are very few American stores.

After the malls, we wandered across one of the many elevated pedestrian bridges to where a crowd was gathering outside of a large department store. Apparently they do product promotions in this particular spot and the brand for the day was Ponds. We couldn't tell what was going on, aside from the advertising aspect. There were four young men with microphones and a group of about 40 young girls in Ponds t-shirts. We surmised that it might be some sort of model search.

From there we wandered to Lumpini Park, one of Bangkok's large parks and rented a paddle boat, which was quite amusing because it was abnormally difficult to peddle. With great effort, we paddled over to a small bridge for the shade and spent a few minutes enjoying the Thai graffiti (Thai's traditionally have very long names and hence have adopted the practice of picking up a "pet name," which is usually three or four letters long. These made for some very amusing graffiti). My favorite was "Big loves Poo."

That evening, exhausted from our walking tour of Bangkok, we decided to treat ourselves to a movie, Gold Class. Now I have been to some posh movie theaters in my day, but none have come close to Bangkok's Gold Class. You average Joe movie goer will pay about 240 bhat for a movie with regular theater seats (more on this later as I haven't seen such a theater), while your finicky movie goer, for a whopping 300 bhat goes first class - Gold Class. Gold class theaters replace theater seats with Lazy Boy recliners. I am not kidding. They are huge and immensely comfortable. The back row is line with love seats (and while I cannot attest to their comfort level - they sure looked inviting!) and the first two rows have recliners. Between each recliner is a small table where the cocktail waitress will bring your meal or your poison of choice (the "snack bar" is a fully stocked liquor bar). Because there are only a few Gold Class theaters, you have a small selection of moves (in English with Thai subtitles or in Thai) so we settled for The Ring Two, which, I am sorry to say, fell far short of its predecessor. But the experience was worth it!

One Sunday we went to the Chatuchak weekend market - by foot, ferry and sky train. The Sky Train is a great way to see the city: air conditioned, no traffic and cheaper than a taxi for long distances. Chatuchak is HUGE and it is impossible to see everything in a few hours or possibly even a few days. Tony wanted to add to his collection of "engrish" t-shirts (t-shirts with horribly mis-spelled sayings or those that make absolutely no sense at all) and I wanted to get sun-glasses, a calculator (to keep track of my bhat expenditure) and a tank top (did I mention Bangkok is HOT?).

Foon likes to say that you can buy anything at Chatuchak except a house or an airplane and he isn't far off. The little that we saw in three hours included various crafts, clothes, shoes, food, household items, tools, furniture, pets and much more that I can't recall. What stood out the most was the pets. The place was crawling with puppies and you couldn't get away from them. It was really sad because it was obvious that they had been taken away from their mothers too soon and they had to be so hot. I wanted to buy them all! They also had baby squirrels that looked like they had literally been stolen from their nests that morning, tied by their necks with string and not at all happy about it (I later learned from Foon that this is illegal).

We found a t-shirt stand and spent about 20 minutes in hysterics digging through the piles of shirts. I wish I could remember what they said. I'll have to make more notes next time. I got myself a 59 bhat shirt, a 37 bhat t-shirt, a 45 bhat calculator and a great pair of sunglasses for 150 bhat (about 38 bhat to the dollar).

After about three hours, we were beat and headed back to the house for dinner and a nap. We topped the weekend off at our neighborhood bar and felt very satisfied with ourselves!