Feeling Ten Years Younger in Bangkok!

 Dec 15, 2010

Senne's Summary: We spent the day exploring a bit, getting our hair done and eating. Once again, we had an excellent day!

One of the great things about this hotel is that they bring your breakfast right up to your room each morning. (We chose what we wanted on a little card the night before). Guess what I had this morning? Whole Wheat Toast!!!! I know this may not sound exciting to you but I haven’t seen whole wheat bread in eons!

Breakfast in our room!

We did a little research on the Internet this morning before we headed out to see what the city had to offer. A few things we discovered were that Thais don’t shake hands, you should never touch a Thai person’s head, and Thai people never have angry outbursts in public. I like this place… don’t touch me and be nice 😀

We wandered around our neighbourhood a bit, mostly looking for laundry because we figured out to wash our clothes at the hotel would be approximately $80 Canadian (not happening!) We did find a laundry that was 80 Baht per kilogram (after A LOT of looking) and dropped our laundry off there. As we walked around more we discovered a market of sorts on the sidewalk. I feel my shopping obsession coming back… they had so many things I could imagine myself buying. I didn’t buy anything… yet…

Next we headed up to the Sky Train and headed down to the area with all the malls. Wow. This place has a LOT of shopping!!! One mall we went to was 8 stories full of shops, restaurants and movie theatres… and this was only one of MANY malls!

Oh I found another thing to love about Bangkok. You don’t have to worry about crossing insanely busy streets… there are so many skywalks that you don’t even have to worry about the traffic. This made me very happy after the very scary road crossing I’ve experienced in Vietnam!

Happy to be looking down at the traffic, rather than being IN the traffic!

One of the first things we saw when we entered the giant mall where we spent most of our afternoon is a gigantic ice cream shop. We will definitely be back to this place. I convinced Steve we should eat real food before we got ice cream 😉

The next place we passed that caught our attention was the hairdressers. Steve has been talking about breaking the vow and cutting his hair… but we moved on. We didn’t move on very far, when Steve decided he was sick of the curly mess and was going to cut his hair. Back we went.

While I was sitting down and Steve was getting his hair washed I was receiving the hard sell from one of the stylists… she wanted to know where I was from, where I’d been travelling, but most importantly "Why you let the grey do that to your hair?!?" Honestly I didn’t have an answer for that. My hair was a disaster… and you know how I hate the sparkly hair… it didn’t take much convincing and she had me in the chair ready to have the sparkles removed.

We are both so glad we did it. An hour or so later we both looked (or at least felt) 10 years younger. Okay so Steve broke his hair cutting vow… but look how pretty he looks! ☺

Steve feeling lighter… and me feeling younger, we headed back out to find some food. We went up to the fifth floor where we found an international food fair. You might think that on our first full day in Thailand that we would want Thai food… but you might be forgetting we’ve just spent 2 ½ months in Asia. After carefully scoping out all the choices (and there were a lot) we chose the Greek food (my favourite food of all types of food!). We were not disappointed. I’m not sure if it’s because we haven’t had fresh salad in so long (worried about it being washed in unsanitary water), but the Greek Salad was to die for!!! Seriously, I couldn’t believe how good it was. The rest of the Greek food was also delicious. Now I’m feeling young and full of yummy food. This is turning into a spectacularly good day!

Oh, I almost forgot about my embarrassing moment :) When we were looking at the Greek Souvlaki , the lady asked what I thought was, “Do you want some curry fries”. You know how I feel about curry (YUCK), so I quickly and definitively said NO. Steve however caught what she really said, and whispered in my ear that she actually said “Curly Fries”. I had to politely say that yes indeed I did want the curly fries. Who doesn’t want fries that are curly???

After eating we wandered around the mall a bit more (I may have bought a few small things 😀) and then decided to go back to our hotel. Once again we caught the Sky Train. It was amazing how orderly people were. There were tons of people waiting for the train, but they all lined up in neat lines to the side of where the doors would be (There were markings on the ground that indicated where you should stand.) Then when the train came everyone waited politely for the people inside to get off, before filing onto the train in an orderly manner. There was no pushing, shoving or jockeying for position. I don’t think anyone bumped into or even touched anyone else. It was most excellent!

The final thing we noticed as we headed back to our hotel were the immense amounts of Christmas Lights and decorations. The Thais do not skimp on the Christmas Lights. I’ll have to go out and take some photos… it was very beautiful… and without the grossness of snow and cold!

Not sure why they have the bunnies out for Christmas???