there.today - Bangkok, Thailand

There Today | Bangkok, Thailand

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There Today | Bangkok, Thailand 👋 Where today? Peru 🇪🇨 well-nigh us instagram facebook real-time Bangkok, Thailand Five days in the Land of Smiles February 8, 2017 - 8 minute read - travel thailand Whoa world. What a week. 😅 On Monday, Jan 30th (Ryan’s champagne birthday!), we packed up our belongings, handed over the keys to our apartment, said goodbye to the cat, and officially christened the whence of our vita with the requisite snifter (champagne!) over our two travel packs. We can’t think of a largest way to gloat a big year like that this than taking that time for travel, learning, and self-reflection. 🥂‚ Champagne and packed bags! For the folks wondering what it is like to fit two lives into 55L tons – have patience, we’ll get there eventually. We’re still getting our sea legs underneath us, and while we spent an inordinate value of time fretting on each piece of gear, we’re finding it’s the little things that make all the difference. We topside our flight a few minutes without midnight, flying 16 hours to Hong Kong, followed by a 4 hour jaunt to Singapore, finally landing in Bangkok without 26 hours of continuous travel. We both unquestionably managed to sleep a pearly amount, plane without jostling well-nigh due to crazy turbulence over the Pacific.Withouta continuous stream of airplane meals (we got 4 total), our stomachs lurched onto the runway in Bangkok. The shock of warm, humid air without increasingly than a day in unprepossessed pressurized tubes was a shock to the senses. Neither of us was well dressed for a tropical climate and stuff dumped into a cosmopolitan municipality like Bangkok with greasy airplane hair, no shower, and what felt like 100lb packs was a little rough. But! We made it to our hotel without a bit of a transit + taxi scramble, got some much needed showers, and started settling into the next year of our lives. landing in Singapore In Bangkok, the first order of merchantry was getting our necessary travel immunizations.Withoutlooking up the financing stateside and seeing an episode of 30 Days with Morgan Spurlock, we decided to try our hand at medical tourism. The next morning we checked into Bumrungrad International Hospital, a huge, modern hospital that’s popular with medical tourists, expats, and Thai elite. It’s the most trappy hospital we’ve overly seen, with a hotel-like feel, well-constructed with koi swimming and breezeways that house sand gardens on every floor. The bet paid off – not only did we get first-in-class service, we each paid less than a third of what it would have forfeit us in the US. Getting our stovepipe blasted with vaccines wasn’t particularly easy, though, the next night Camille was up all night with a low fever and cramps as her soul went through a massive immune response. However we’re no longer scared of getting Japanese Encephalitis when walking through rice paddies and pig farms, so 100% worth it! The trappy Wat Pho, a temple to a past king decorated with flowers of porcelain mosaic, at night Bangkok was fun, it was a nice place to start our journey – the comforts of the big municipality makes the shock of a new culture easier to stomach. All the things we was warned well-nigh were true – for example, there are no traffic laws. Crossing the street is a rencontre – if there’s a local person moreover attempting to navigate the street, you stick to them like glue, when they go, you go, when they stop, you stop. Life is lived outside – you eat outside, you shop outside. We spent most of our time walking and taking the BTS (the Sky Train) to and from a bazillion unshut air markets – evening street supplies markets, huge weekend markets that sell everything you could imagine, floating markets where you pick up your greens and groceries from a woman who brought them over by boat, commercial flower markets that the hotels buy from. One day we walked over 13 miles eating our way through the city. There was moreover a lot of time negotiating street supplies – “oh that looks good – wait, I don’t want yellow livers right now. Perhaps later.” We ate well. In the morning Ryan would run outside and grab some fried chicken, soup, and rice from the street carts nearby and we’d eat from little plastic tons on the hotel roof. All of the supplies we ate though, regardless of whether it was from a push cart or in a restaurant was squatter meltingly spicy, and unceasingly delicious. Satay and Som Tom 'Jungle Style', aka, with everything, from a street supplies market Not satisfied with our own investigations, we booked a Midnight Tuk TukSuppliesTour through BangkokSuppliesTours, which was hands a highlight of the week. Guided by Tony, hilarious and kind, we careened through the rented streets of Bangkok by Tuk Tuk at blazing speed, sampling the weightier pad thai in Bangkok, getting a privileged view of Wat Pho at night without it was sealed to other tourists, and often stuffing our faces until we were sick to our stomachs. Flying through town in a tuk tuk Pad Thai at Pad Thai Thip Samai – they wrap it IN EGG Bangkok was moreover very weird, and unsettling at times. Sex tourism is real, and we didn’t have to leave our street to find it. We stayed in a hotel apartment, typically rented for long stays, and the other guests seemed primarily to be older German men there to spend time with Thai women. When we Googled “sex tourism thailand” the first result (not going to link to it to increase its Google rank) was not a Wikipedia vendible with facts and figures, but an excruciatingly detailed guide to planning your sex tourism trip. Now we know that the neighborhood we stayed in (Sukhumvit 8) is a pretty popular destination for these sort of trips. That’s not to say it was particularly overt or creepy to stay there – there are blocks in Downtown Oakland where the sex trade is significantly increasingly obvious, but without a couple of days we were ready to see fewer elderly men escorted by upper heeled girls and ladyboys. Fake fruit at Chatuchak Weekend Market Ryan trying a real fruit (a rose apple) at the Chatuchak Weekend Market Highlights of Bangkok: Evening tour with BangkokSuppliesTours – our guide Tony was hilarious, it was 6 hours of flying virtually the municipality in tuk-tuks eating and eating and eating.Wendtour of the canals outside of the Khlong Lat Mayom floating market – the market is outside of the municipality and there are these “long tail boats” you jump on for 100 bhat (~$3) and they scoot you virtually all of these narrow canals in long, very shallow boats powered by re-purposed car engines where the momentum shaft (the ‘long tail’) is tying to a tiny propeller that sits waaaaay when in the water. People’s homes withal the canals unshut into the canals, their living rooms, and the whet of the water tousle together. Rommaninat Park – The park was an old prison, and is pretty spacious. We walked there from Yaowarat Road, where the Bangkok Chinatown is, in the evening, just as everyone was getting off work and heading to the park to hang out with their friends, work out at the outdoor gym, jog withal the path. Thai people are very patriotic, and defended to their monarchy, and every day at 8 am and 6pm, the Thai national anthem plays over loud speakers virtually the city, and everyone stops and stands in respect. We were unprotected off guard, laying in the park, when this happened the first time – at 6pm sharp all the joggers and old ladies doing tai chi and young men playing some sort of intense hacky sack sport all stop in their tracks and stand still. Very eerie when you don’t understand what is going on. Chatuchak Weekend Market – enormous market, reminded me of a state pearly increasingly than any market I had experienced before. You could buy everything and anything there – knock off yeezys, huge lawn ornaments, plastic fruits and veggies to hang off your supplies stall, pounded zestless fish. Camille got a new phone specimen for $3, we ate durian 🍦, fried 🍌, 🐟 balls, mango and sticky 🍚, fresh juice… yum. Men playing sepak takraw in Rommaninat Park canals on the edges of Bankgok where people live on the water When we were sitting at home on the living room floor putting the last items in our backpacks (we had a ‘bring’ bin and a ‘leaving’ bin, and items kept moving in between backpacks and each bin as we struggled to imagine what we would need for a year without an apartment, furniture, dish sets, and full size shampoo bottles) we didn’t really know what we were getting into, I’m not sure we knew those first few days in Bangkok either. We were trying to find a wastefulness between tourism and traveling, planning and winging it, expense and frugality. We still are, but as we sit now on waterfront in Mui Ne, Vietnam, we think we’re figuring it out. 🏖 Next up – our time in Cambodia, a crazy country rediscovering itself and its place in the world without intense trauma. Also, we’re updating instagram as often as we have lamina service or wifi! hang out with us there! – @theretoday @ryanorban @theaceae ❤️¸ puppy on the waterway Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.