Bangkok - City of Angels

Krung Thep Manakhon Bovorn Ratanskosin Magintharayutthaya Mahadilokpop Noparatratchathani Burirom Udomratchanivet
mahasathan Avatartsathit Sakkathattiya Visnukarmrasit,

Translation:

City of Angels, greatest of all cities,home of the emerald Buddha, immortal, precious jewel, invincable stronghold, ancient and honourable, crownded with nine jewels, heavenly city, founded by Indra and rebuilt by Vishnu.....

thankfully for us, this mouthful boils down to the single name, Bangkok (map). We arrived on Saturday lunchtime having escaped the packs of wild dogs that roamed the dump called 'Ayuthaya' and headed over to Banglampu, the district of Bangkok where most tourists stay. This includes the Khoa San (movie) road, which is a real backpacker dive, full of a lot of smelly, dread wearing types, yanks and drunk 18 year old westerners. We decided not to stay there and ran around the corner to a much quieter street called Soi Rambuttri where our pretty good hotel, the Four Sons Village is. Its got a/c, tv (Unique Remote control!) and hot water for 500 baat a night (7 quid), which is a little bit more than we've been paying for a room, but it is Bangkok and also we didn't want a scummy room for not much less.
After settling in and having a wonder round our local area we headed over to Chinatown for the evening. It's a mad rush of traffic, smells (not all food), neon, people and ?meat on sticks. Our mouths were soon salivating so we dived into the nearest restaurant and gorged ourselves on roast duck and dim sum.
The next day, being Sunday, we took ourselves over to Chatuchak weekend market. Its gigantic! Literally thousands of stalls and shops filled to the brim with almost anything you want to buy. Food, clothes, actually tons and tons of cloths, fish (alive or dead), puppy's, toys, lamp shades, sofas, you get the picture. Absolutely mind-boggling! We spent several hours gawping at it all, you can buy live fish in bags, not so strange if its a goldfish, but you can buy 200 quid coy carp in a bag! We even saw some small sharks, though not in a bag.

You don't expect Bangkok to look anything like Tokyo, but catching the skytrain to their brand new shopping centre, the Siam Paragon, transported us back there. Its 7 floors of air-conditioned first-class shopping, an aquarium, gourmet food, imax and digital cinemas. Absolutely superb! So good in fact we spent the rest of the day there. We went to the Imax cinema, which for those of you who don't know is 3D cinema and it's really impressive stuff, you feel like you can just reach out and touch the objects in front of your face, in our case sharks. They make you wear these daft glasses, like Timmy Mallet, but for 2 quid Imax who cares. After some gorgeous Japanese food just to really feel like we were back in Tokyo, but with Thai prices, we went for our second trip to the cinema, again for only 2 pound (8 pounds in Japan), to see the remake of the Poseidon Adventure. I normally hate remakes, but with only vague memories of the original, this one was a corker. Now they'll be those of you out there that might see this film and hate it, but we loved every minute of it. Non-stop action, a healthy cheese filling and some quality special effects. If you have any degree of claustrophobia, then you MUST see this film for one particular scene, which practically had been vomiting it was so disgustingly claustrophobic, brilliant stuff!

Bangkok is a big bundle of horribly polluted roads, seedy back streets, neon skyscrapers, scammsters, monks, farang, chilled out parks, huge lizards, amazing street food and we LOVE this city! Its well up there with Tokyo, a complete assault on the senses and I've not even told you about the ladyboys yet, still next blog........