Bangkok – a city of many tales. To be honest, we didn’t really see that many, since we only had 3 days there, in between Pai and our already booked flight down to Melbourne.
We soon figured that Bangkok is way too big to even remotely see in 3 days. With just over 8 million people living there, Bangkok packs the entire population of Switzerland into an area roughly the size of the Swiss canton of Lucerne.
Getting around was fairly straight forward though. With over 50’000 taxis registered, getting one is usually a matter of seconds, and pretty cheap, too. As usual, some don’t bother turning on the meter if they see you’re a foreigner and just try to get you to pay a ridiculous fixed price, but there’s normally an honest one just around the next corner. Or just use Grab Taxi, the asian version of Uber, which works like a charm. The trains are modern and comfortable, but there are only 2 lines and they don’t cover large areas of the city. So it’s either walking, a mototaxi or a regular taxi to go to places.
We did a lot of walking, as usual, and depending on the neighbourhood, there are some quite nice sceneries. Overall, though, we wouldn’t describe Bangkok as a scenic city, there’s too much ugly concrete and weird mixtures of different styles to appear harmonic in any way.
One thing that’s outstanding, though, is shopping: We have not ever seen so many shopping malls in one city, and so close to each other (well, maybe in Dubai, but that’s a different world anyway). There are dozens of malls, competing for the largest, fanciest, most christmassy-decorated style shopping experience among them. Interesting fact: Asians seem to beat us at orientation indoors. We struggled to find our way in virtually every mall we’ve been in – something that’s never happened before.
The one thing we’ll probably remember most vividly when thinking back on Bangkok was the Muay Thai fight we went to the last night we were there. It was ridiculously expensive compared to everything else in the city except maybe getting golden teeth, but we still decided it was worth it. 8 different fights with 6 rounds each, and we sat in the first row, literally only meters away from the fighters. They all seemed very young and very ripped and yet skinny at the same time, and put up quite a show for us. There was less gore (as in blood) than expected, but we still would not have liked to trade places with them. Almost as interesting as the fight itself though were the Thai men behind us in the upper ranks taking on bets: They would start slow, watching and making guesses, and with each passing round they’d get more aggressive and louder. They’d shout out their guess of the winner, along with a number shown by a count of fingers, which indicated their bet. I didn’t quite figure out the exact way the system worked, but a lot of money traded hands and there certainly was no lack of emotion.
We deliberately decided to leave out one of the most distinguishing features of Bangkok: The nightlife. We’d read a lot about it, but given the fact that we’re very happily married and furthermore had had our fair share of “tittie bars”, as they’re called, down in Phuket, we were happy to leave that chapter out for good.
Recent Comments