Home » Thailand » Southeast Asia 2000 - Travel Diary, Part 2: First impressions of Bangkok

Bangkok never became one of my favourite cities, but the visit there was certainly interesting. The main problem is getting used to all the different impressions that are coming at you all the time. The streets are crowded with all kinds of people, food is being prepared and sold everywhere, stray dogs are all over the place, the volume of traffic is enormous and there are all kinds of different sounds and smells. It is very hard to find peace and tranquility in Bangkok, except in some of the temples. We spent the first three days wandering around the city, getting used to the pace and learning how to deal with "new friends" that had all kinds of "fantastic offers" for us.

Southeast Asia 2000 - Travel Diary, Part 2: First impressions of Bangkok

Jan Arild Teland
2006-05-08 18:18:27

Displayed times (last time: ) Rating 5/5

Rating: 5.00 out of 5.00. 3 members have rated this article

/>
Several buses were going down the street, so we got on one and hoped it would take us near our hotel. Unfortunately, when we got off the bus, we went the wrong way and wandered around in the area for thirty minutes before essentially returning to our starting point. Learning from our mistakes, this time we proceeded in the right direction and soon arrived back at the hotel.

After showering and relaxing some at the hotel we went out again and walked around Banglamphoo looking for a place to eat. We ended up at a Thai restaurant in the street near the river. I had Macaroni with ham and some spring rolls. The food was excellent, but again the meal was rather small and it was difficult to attract the attention of the staff to pay the bill.

On coming out of the restaurant we noticed a small park on the other side of the street, where we sat down to relax. Being next to the river it was a very nice place, and actually the first quiet escape we had found outdoors in Bangkok! We saw an extremely cute little poodle puppy wearing a Liverpool FC shirt! We called it a "Liverpoodlian"! The Thais really seemed to like dogs, especially poodles seemed to be very popular. Despite the large number of straydogs, many dogs seemed well taken care of, the Liverpoodlian being a particularly good example.

There were hundreds of Internet cafees in Banglamphoo we discovered, most of them charging only 1 Bath per minute. We spent some time in one of them sending some travel reports back to Norway. The rest of the evening was spent relaxing and updating our diaries at the hotel.

Day 5 - July 1

We got up around 1015 and had a standard American breakfast at the hotel. Before leaving the hotel, May Tina had an idea of how to solve a problem that had been troubling us for the last two days. There were some incredibly huge cockroaches in our room, and they had the annoying habit of suddenly appearing each time ...