The Wander Wall: Day 1 in Bangkok

Bangkok is such a beautiful place... transportation and food are very cheap. We flew Kenya Airways and I must say that the travel from HK to Bangkok was the smoothest air travel I have ever experienced, smooth take off and landing too. Hats off to the pilot whoever he was.

The food was great too. My friend and I had fish(very tasty) and red wine.

We got to Bangkok past midnight and stayed at this very clean and nice Hotel called Glow Trinity, which my friend booked. It was very cheap and my favorite part of the stay was the buffet breakfast. We decided to rest and not go out that night since we were already tired walking around HK central the whole day.

The hotel is located in Silom, which is very close to a BTS(Bangkok Mass Transit System) Skytrain station that will take you in and around the city. Getting around is very easy, there are a few types of mass transportation that you can choose from to get to where you want to. They have tuk tuks, taxis, trains, and scooters.

We took the pink Toyota taxis for short distance travels.

On our first day, we decided to visit the temples and markets. We took the tuk tuk, a very popular type of public transportation in Thailand. It's sort of like a tricycle.

This is our very polite tuk tuk driver, he drove us around town to see the temples. The fare was very cheap at 30 baht(about 43.5 in Philippine peso or USD.92) for a ride that lasted almost 2 hours. The only catch was, he took us to 2 jewelry and a clothing store and requested for us to look around each store for not less than 5 minutes. This was a promo, I guess of the store owners...that if the driver can bring tourists to their stores, they'd give them free gas. We said okay since he was very nice and we didn't have to buy anything anyway.

So we went to Wat Pho. In Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, "wat" means school, a Buddhist sacred precinct with monks' quarters.

Me, enjoying taking pics of the beautiful structures...

this is where we had to take our slippers off...

a local praying...

some palace I saw while riding the tuk tuk...

there's a lot of other temples in Bangkok...

they have one whole stretch, selling just these flowers, which people usually buy to offer(if I'm using the right term) to the Buddha

After a morning of temple-visiting, we headed back to the hotel for lunch.

this is what I had at the hotel restaurant called the Foodie... yummy!

but street foods are the best too, not to mention very cheap.

rode the skytrain(Bangkok's version of LRT, MRT) on the way to the shopping mall in the afternoon. The stations/terminals are exceptionally clean.

I love this mall, very big but the shops are well(Versace, Tod's, Hermes, Dior, etc...) so we ended up just window shopping.

but I enjoyed the events outside...

a cultural show...

while watching the show, I spotted red mango... I want!

After trying out the food in the festivities in Siam, we decided to walk our way to a popular night bazaar...

I saw this creepy building on our way to the bazaar, it was dark but at the time I took this shot, it was fully functional --- it's the National AIDS Research Center.

the night market was huge, I was not able to take pictures inside because I was busy looking for souvenirs... and the massive collection of dibidis :)