After a pretty rough start to our first day in Bangkok, Zach and I got an early start to today at 3 a.m. I guess that's what happens when you pass out at 4 p.m the previous day. We wanted to try to get more adjusted to the local time, so we tried falling back asleep, but that didn't seem to work. So we instead slowly got ready while we waited for this amazing breakfast place to open up down the street at 7. After that, we took the metro to the main train station to buy our tickets to Chiang Mai. At that point we hadn't decided on whether we would leave for Chiang Mai tonight or stay another night in Bangkok. As it turned out, they had seats on an air conditioned sleeper train for tonight so we went with that. We’ll be passing through Bangkok again multiple times during our trip so if we missed out on anything we have another shot at it later. After the train station, we had like 8 hours to kill before going back for our train, so we found our way to the mall via Bangkok sky train. We might be slightly obsessed with the public transportation system here. For like $0.60 you can take an air conditioned train pretty much anywhere in the city. Everything is in English, you buy tickets from a touch screen kiosk, and my favorite part is that it's okay to look a little lost without someone pestering you to let them drive you to their clothing factory. That's probably one of my favorite things about Bangkok.
The mall we visited was pretty much what you would see in the US, but like 1000 times bigger. We weren't really looking for anything in particular, just walking around in the AC. There was a small temple in the city center which was lovely to visit. We ate pretty much continuously throughout the day because we were so hungry from all the walking we did. (27,000 steps / 11.2 miles according to my fitbit). We stopped at some food stalls and tried their BBQ chicken on a stick which was amazing. So later, we went back and decided to try the beef this time. It looked like beef and smelled like beef. But it was more of a beef shaped paste pod. Super gross. Terrible idea. 0/10 would not recommend. The rest of our meals for the day were delicious and incredibly spicy. At one restaurant the waiter placed a flower pot of what looked like cabbage and an intricate arrangement of leaves on the table. “Table decoration or food garnishes? Better eat it either way”- Zach’s thought process on that.
Long story short, we packed up our stuff and we are now about to eat dinner on our overnight train to Chiang Mai. It left at 6 p.m and we should get there by 7 a.m tomorrow. We brought some snacks for the ride and our goal was to go into the 7-11 and buy the weirdest food we could find. Zach won with his dried cuttlefish jerky, so we’ll see how that goes tonight.
We booked another airbnb right in the city center, but we can't check in until 1 p.m, so we will probably go find some wifi so that we can actually locate the place, then drop off our bags and hopefully find a nice place for a Thai massage. We don't really know how long we’ll be in northern Thailand, maybe a week? But our plans include, in no particular order, trekking, river rafting, visiting elephant sanctuaries, cooking classes, markets, and of course more temples. I'm looking forward to a long night of Zach making a commentary on everything he sees out the window, such as “that lady just got a smack down in checkers” and “I've just been watching this dog take a dump”. Can't wait to see what's next.
