Thursday Feb 11, 2010
The nonsensical title above is a shout-out to my buddy Shanthan (do you even read these posts?).
Do I celebrate Chinese new year? If by celebrate you mean take advantage of two consecutive days off from work to go to Thailand, then you bet your ass I do! In order to make this trip work, I was going to need a bit more time, so I took an extra two days off from work. That only means that you need to cram those 2 days into your last day before you leave. I did just that and left the office at 3:30 am Thursday morning, got to my apartment at 4:00, packed until 5:00, stared at the wall in a zombie state for 15 minutes and left for the airport at 5:15am.
We got lucky when we reached the hotel at 10:00am, and they gave us our room. Sorry, introductions. Us is Aiola - a fellow MDP colleague/friend, and of course, yours truly, me. She had arrived in Singapore a month after I did from the NY office as well where we had worked together for the previous two years. Wanting to crash right then and there, we pushed ourselves to get out of the hotel and start one of the two activities that Bangkok is famous for...shopping (I'll get to the other one later).
I have to be honest, I wasn't thrilled with the idea of hours of shopping, but I can't complain too much since I did walk away with a new shirt (good quality at good a quality price) a new belt (medium quality at medium quality price) and some DVD's for cheap (I'm assuming that these work right now as I haven't checked them yet). The way I saw it, was that for the most part, you got what you paid for. Sure there were knock-offs at low prices, but from what I saw, it wouldn't be in good condition very long. Case in point, Aiola bought a very nice chinese dress, but you could tell the quality wasn't there. After the first time wearing it, it tore at the shoulder. One thing worth noting was the layout of the shopping. When we started near our hotel, there were nothing but the best (legit) stores, a kind of 5th avenue type setting only in a mall. As you got further away, the stores gradually changed over to no name stores and then eventually you end up in the back where it's more of a bazar where haggling is expected.
Back to the hotel, we tried to plan our next move, but ended up making the right decision in passing out for an hour before dinner. At my neighbor's suggestion (he lived in Bangkok for 2 years) we ate at the Blue Elephant which is considered royal Thai cuisine. As with many fine restaurants, there is a chefs section where you have the option to choose one appetizer, one entree, and one dessert. The difference here is that the three or four "options" were actually all prepared and presented to you. It was an excellent way to sample a variety of Thai food at one sitting. All of this being said, and with the ability to compare with what came next in Chiang Mai, I have to say that especially at 10 times the price, Blue Elephant has a hard time stacking up against The Riverside restaurant.
After dinner, Aiola and I went for a drink at Vertigo, a rooftop bar on the 61st floor of the Banyan Tree Hotel. The views were amazing and the martini good, but I was ready to see what the real Bangkok was like. With that in mind, we traveled to Pat Pong road where the second most notable (not necessarily in that order) attribute of Thailand was...bars with go go girls. I don't think that I had my second foot out of the taxi before some guy approached me, asking if I wanted to see a sex show. Nevermind that Aiola was right next to me, he actually had a printed off list of things that I could see. After shaking him and several other guys off, we walked into a club where there were girls dancing, fully clothed although skimpy. This club had a non threatening vibe, and all the girls asked Aiola if we were together before asking if I wanted a dance which I refused anyway. Aiola seemed to enjoy herself even more than I did, and actually danced with the girls for a few minutes, just for fun.
Not wanting to spend the whole night in just one place, we walked out to see what else was out there. We walked into another club and it wasn't until I sat down that I noticed that this place was different. Clearly there were different intentions here since all the girls had numbers pinned to their bikini's. Not only did I not like the situation, I was worried that there were a few lady-boys that I had heard about staring me down. I uncomfortably guzzled my Heineken, and we hightailed it out of there.
We stopped at another bar with live music just long enough to watch some guy fall off of a stool while hitting on Aiola, and an Australian guy take off his pants in the bar and do some crazy dancing. That about satisfied our curiosity, and we decided to call it a night.
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