Hi Pals,
It's been a while since i last made a post here, cos i was busy with the prep for my little getaway to Thailand, Bangkok. I must say that this trip has benn, at the very least, a great eye opener to the very much sheltered Singaporean, (myself included). The following paragraphs shall give an account of what went on over there:
DAY 1 -
After touching down from a good 2 hours of leg and head space constraint aboard the budget airliner - Jetstar Asia, both Mark and myself were very much eager to set out on our exploration of the city heart.
In the spur of excitement, and perhaps a little brain mulfunction from the not-so-comfortable trip, we were stupidly convinced to taking a limo-cab (it's just a bloody camry) to our hotel, which cost us 700 baht! Ripped of immediately after arrival, what a welcome :(
The taxi went straight on the expressway, which, unlike those we find here, are all build about 50 to 100 metres above ground level. For a while we were pretty impressed with the industrial and commercial advancements, till we exited the expressway into the district where our hotel was supposed to be.
The following gives a figurative illustration of the 2 main parts of the journey:
What's reflected by the light green arrows represents the journey from the airport till we exited the expressway and entered the roads of the hotel district. That took a total of about 20 minutes. (Please note that only a small part of the expressway is drawn out).
What's reflected in light blue is the our less than 300 metre journey from the expressway exit to the hotel, which took about 40 minutes. Picture yourself engaged in a real interesting concversation you start losing track of time, and when you look up, "Hey! We're on the same spot!"
Well that's all for the traffic, anyways we still had 3 more days to get used to it (which we eventually did).
Our next stop was, well logically, to satisfy our stomachs before the acid juices burn a hole in them. So we strolled down the road for about 200 metres to the commercial hotspot of Bangkok - Siam Square. Sadly though, by the time we arrived we were two sticky blobs of melting toon paint. The temperature was a boiling 40 degrees centigrade!
We dragged ourselves into some building just before our functional fuses burnt out, only to discover that there didn't seem to be any eating spot other than Macs and KFC (which is obviously not what we were looking for, come'on who goes overseas to eat Macs and KFC!!??)
Fortunately, after a few rounds of failed attempt to translate the thai encrypted signboards (they're more complicated than a 512 bit encrypted computer virus), we managed to find this little place they call the pizza company (it's still crap for a welcome meal to an exotic place, but it sounded better than burgers and wings)
The waitress came and after much confusion (our order was placed using a mix of croaking, flapping and finger pointing). The pizza had crabmeat and wasabi packed into it, that was real good. It was here that i discovered mark's really tiny stomach, it's perhaps nothing bigger than a ping pong ball (which means a lot can be done with it, refer to the section on ping pong antics on day 3).
By the end of lunch, the heat was really getting the better of us, so we headed back to the hotel on skytrain and decided on a spa / massage session. THE MASSAGE WAS UTTER TORTURE! I STILL HAVE BRUISES ON MY BACK TILL NOW! And in my last attempt to save my little ego (I was really about to scream), my face distorted into something between a dried prune and a sadako cursed face.
That sort of ended the interesting happenings of Day 1...
