Bangkok – Part 1
Travelogue for Bangkok – Part 1
Из “Tour of Southeast Asia”
МАРШРУТА НА ЦЯЛАТА НИ ОБИКОЛКА В ЮГОИЗТОЧНА АЗИЯ И ВСИЧКИ ПЪТЕПИСИ ЗА
СИНГАПУР, МАЛАЙЗИЯ, О-В ПУКЕТ, БАНКОК И О-В БАЛИ може да видите ТУК.
To Part Two
What it's like to walk around a city where people wear masks because of the polluted air, eat in an authentic Japanese restaurant, and enter a real Buddhist temple – these are just part of our experiences on the other side of the world, namely Southeast Asia and more specifically Bangkok.
The next morning, 19.11, we woke up mid-morning because we had to catch our flight from Phuket island to Bangkok, which was departing at 6:55 AM with Air Asia.
We had booked a taxi in advance because no shuttles operate at that time of day. We had agreed with the taxi driver to be in front of the hotel at 4:00 AM so that we could arrive at the airport on time. However, he was late, and we started to get worried, calling the company we had booked him from. In the end he arrived, apparently he had overslept, and managed to drop us off just before we missed check-in.
We arrived at the huge airport in Bangkok and wondered how to get to the station. Supposedly we could take a train, but we would have had to wait an hour for the next one. So we caught a city bus to Phaya Thai (this is the stop where the metro starts) and from there took the metro to the Ekkamai stop (View the hotel HERE), which was closest to our hotel. We went to the hotel, but we were turned away and told to come back in a few hours when it was time to check in.
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Using our free time, we took a walk around the neighborhood, which turned out to be terribly dirty, locals were cooking and selling street food, which is a trademark of Thailand.
Swarm of mopeds, heavy traffic jams and pedestrians are not favored. Often we can see people wearing masks, who wore them, not for anything else, but because of air pollution.
We checked into the hotel, went into the room and honestly speaking that was the most disappointing room in our entire trip. There wasn't even a normal wardrobe, and the view through the window was actually a wall that was 3 meters away. Breakfast consisted only and solely of muesli, fresh milk, flakes and a few fruits. Definitely do not recommend this hotel.
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Honestly, we didn't feel like going out into all that dirt outside again, but either way we had arrived and had to fill a whole 4 days in Bangkok.
We went for a walk around the Old Town, where we saw the statues of the Big Buddha and the Royal Palace. The way there was very exhausting against the background of the heat, dirty air and heavy traffic. Many times tuk-tuk drivers offered to drive us to our desired place, but we refused.
Along the way we saw various craftsmen and the poverty in which some people live caught our eye. But in many places there is no sidewalk or if there is one, it is necessarily occupied either with a small street food cart, or a moped is parked on it. Bangkok is not at all for people with small children and baby strollers.
At one point we got confused and started stopping people, begging them to direct us to the Big Buddha. It was very funny, because we told them “The Big Buddha” or “River”, (because the main sights were close to the river), we also showed them the river on the map and they didn't even catch what we were asking them. Even if they don't know English, at least they should be able to navigate by the drawn blue river on the map. This happened with a few people. There were also some who walked right past us – extremely rude attitude. And those who wanted to help us, unfortunately almost didn't know English. And if it happened to stop someone who doesn't speak a lick of English, it often happened that he stopped someone else who might know English and the two would start talking in Thai at length and in width and we would just sit and watch and expect someone from somewhere to direct us and finally after about 5 minutes of waiting we would be directed from somewhere, and unfortunately, in almost all cases, it turned out to be in the wrong direction.
We went into some Buddhist temple, but it wasn't all that interesting, since we aren't into Buddhism either as a religion or as an ideology.
What we really liked was the flower market – Flower Market.
There was a huge variety of flowers in various colors, as well as we could discover a great abundance of marigold wreaths or trays made of flowers and leaves that Thais put in their shrines and in front of Buddha statues..
We passed by a Buddhist school, in front of which Buddhist teachers were smoking. Several times it happened to me in the metro to have to move, as Buddhist monks must not touch a woman. Usually they travel in groups and separate themselves from the other people, for example if they travel by metro, they will cram into one corner where there will be no danger of impure touch (i.e. a woman :))
It started to get dark, and we didn't know where we were.
We walked and walked and didn't get anywhere. My map-reading skills failed me and we got very lost. After dark we walked through some very nasty and presumably dangerous area to get out to the main street in Chinatown.
That was a different story – bright, colorful and full of people. There were even a couple of newlyweds doing a photo shoot. Surely there was something to see, look around and try there, but we were so tired that we wanted to catch the metro and get back to the hotel as quickly as possible, as we did.
The next morning I had planned to visit Ancient City, which is located about 20-30 kilometers south of Bangkok. We "had breakfast" and set off. First we had to get to the last metro station and from there we had to catch a free bus. We got pretty lost until we found the bus, but eventually we got on in time. We were the only passengers in a whole 50-person bus.
The driver first stopped to look at some Trojan horse, but we didn't want to spend our money on that and just waited in the beautiful garden in front. The other people who had left with the previous bus were now going to get on our bus. That way, all of us together reached Ancient City.
The entrance was about 30 levs per person, and you could choose to get a free bicycle or be driven around in a cart. Also, inside the park itself, we saw a small bus that groups of students were getting on. We chose to ride bicycles.
The park turned out to be extremely well-maintained and beautiful, I would even say quaintly made, compared to the rest of reality in Thailand. It represents a complex of many famous buildings and temples in Thailand and from Thailand's history, only built in miniature size. It is worth visiting and I definitely recommend doing it by bicycle. At one place we also saw one of their traditional Thai boats.
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After getting back to Bangkok, we decided to go to the modern part of Bangkok this time, where we found many malls and modern business buildings.
There we realized how big the difference is between poor and rich in Thailand.
We walked around MKB and Sala Daeng malls. On the last evening, we dined in a real Japanese restaurant. It was very interesting as there were quite a few dishes unfamiliar to us on the menu. I, for example, ordered a pizza, which, however, really shocked me when it arrived. It didn't look like pizza at all according to my, and I suppose, your views 🙂 – Does the thing on the plate to the left look like pizza to you?
Something that couldn't go unnoticed is that the modern trends in the makeup of Thai women mainly consist of emphasizing the eyebrows with a pencil and whitening the face.
To BANGKOK – Part 2
Many more photos, for which there was no room left in the article, can be seen and commented on in the gallery below:
