And no, I don't want a massage.
Arriving in Bangkok was relatively exciting, but then I get relatively excited arriving in WHSmith shops. We drove to the hotel, and the biggest plus of our stay in Bangkok was probably seeing our hotel room, because it was pretty nice, and there was a pool, a bar, two restaurants, and the staff looked after us really well. BUT that evening we got all dressed for the cool evening weather, went outside, realised it wasn't cool but really really warm, and then went to find a market we'd all heard about being fabutastic. When we arrived at this market, it was sort of fabutastic, in that both that word and the market don't exist after 8pm. So we went home again, but only after wandering the streets (which smell odd there) for an hour trying to find somewhere to eat. In the end we settled on the restaurant inside our hotel.
The next couple of days were spent darting into and out of an air conditioned mini bus at various temples, markets, Buddha statues, etc etc. They were all relatively ok, but the main thing everyone, or at least I, was thinking about was how stupidly hot it was and how on earth am I gonna be able to live in Thailand's heat for 2 weeks...
After three days in Bangkok we were pretty much fed up. So we went to Chang Mai, however it's spelt, and spent some days there, (this was my favourite place in Thailand) and then to Phuket, which was pretty good. Then we were all ready to go. We'd had enough of the horrific heat, and the people shouting "MASSAAAAGE?" or telling us that we were really good friends, do we want a suit/dvd/hat/necklace/to eat in their restaurant, or calling us babes and not remotely looking like anything but a prostitute. The amount of people I saw trying to sell taylor made suits shocked me, I wondered how many people could possible go on a beach holiday to Phuket and rather than going to the beach or on trips to Islands or to see monkeys or to do water sports, they just go to buy a tailor made suit. It seemed a bit stupid.
And so, fed up, we returned to Bangkok airport, slightly worried because of the volcanic ash, but we thought, it'll be more or less ok, we'll just fly to Europe and then train it back.
No.
We weren't going anywhere. And we didn't know it then, but we weren't going anywhere for about 10 days. And we had to just wait on standby for all of those 10 days as it turned out, at any moment prepared to leg it to the airport and come home.
So we had 10 more days to spend in Bangkok. I nearly cried.
We did everything worthwhile doing in the first 3 of those days. We thought we don't know when we're going back, but let's makes the most of it. So we did a crocodile farm and shopping at some massive centres or trendy markets. And they were all quite fun. But then we had the rest of the 7 days, although for all we knew it could've been 1, 2, 3, 4 5, 6, 7 or more days. We knew one of my friends in Miami had been told they won't be flying back until over a month later. And so we just had to wait. And re-visit markets and shopping centres.
Oh, and try and avoid the city centre, which was 10 minutes away and had grenades going off and people firing assault rifles.
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1 comment:
come on, I was there for 3 days and it was no-where near enough. I saw some amazing things. Where else could you see political violence first hand, get chased by lady boys and eat such great food?
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