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Day
18
(December 12, 2010) Bangkok
Before
We have the whole day to complete our list of
visits in
Bangkok. At evening, we woulg go to the airport for the return flight
to home, at 7:50 PM. At 11:15 PM it lands in Doha, where we must spend
8 hours and 35 minutes in the airport. There are rooms to for spending
the night there, so we’ll visit one of them.
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After
This is the start of our last day here as this
evening we’re going to take our flight back to home but, before that,
we have an entire day to spend in this amazing city. And this day
begins with the breakfast buffet in this hotel. How I’ve missed it!
It is not happening too much to me, but for a few specific times, where
I wish I could get more food into me. This is one of them.
Now let’s go outside. Today is Sunday and we can
visit the biggest market in the world – or one of the biggest markets
in the world depending where you’re reading about it -. So, although we
were yesterday in the main shopping places of Bangkok we cannot leave
this city without being in Chatuchak. We’ll need the sky train to go
there.
Yesterday we did the trip from Nana station to Chit Lom by 20
Baht per person, today we’re going to the final station of the line:
from Nana to Mo Chit by 40 Baht pp.
The ride is gentle and we can enjoy the views
between skyscrapers which are disappearing as we’re reaching the end of
the line.
I have a collection of public transport tickets
from cities around the world and it is so annoying when using the
ticket for leaving the sky train and the machines keep it.
When we’re out in Mo Chit it looks as being in the
outskirts. Although we’re going to the biggest market in the world we
cannot see it from here and we use the old move of following the
tourists until we find the right way. It goes through a park with a lot
of live from which we can see, through the bars bordering it, some
stalls of the street market.
So we go to there and look to the goods on sell, but it is
not looking as the biggest market, not even a big one. That’s because
this is the people selling outside of the market taking advantage of
the crowd coming here. The Chatuchak market is in walls and, when
coming in through one of its doors we can see what we expected.
I’m going to try to describing it here: it is like
a town composed by streets full of stalls and then you can go into the
“buildings”, which are no more than small stores in fixed walls
overflowed by their goods linked by narrow pass ways. If we add to this
image hundreds or thousands of people we will be close of the real
picture.
We cannot dream about seeing all the shops in one
day, even with no stopping in any of them. When we’re buying a couple
of bottles of water in one of many places with food and completely lost
inside this maze of goods, we’re offered a map of the market by 20 Baht
and I can say now it was the best purchase of the day. Thanks to that
map we find out there is an organization, in this apparently chaos, of
themes by areas. So, as we’ve already got souvenirs, t-shirts, pants,
etc… we go to the area for pets looking for something to bring to our
dogs.
I'm leaving here
a scanned copy of this map.
We got a pack of four balls by 1€, a
leash and a pack of three shirts - or however you want to call these
kind of cloths for dogs - by 1 more euro.
Don’t look at me like this! I’m not willing on
dressing dogs as persons, but my wife is. I think if they could talk we
would here a speech about proud and humiliation. Someday they’ll take
their revenge.
After some hours or, better said, the entire
morning through the narrow and similar streets of this market we manage
to leave the place with the help of the map and reach the sky train.
This time we seat in the right side of
the train and could get this picture of Victory Monument giving the
name to the station we’re passing by. A bit later we can see Bayoke
Tower announcing our stop is near.
 
A few minutes later we’re in Central World, one of
the shopping malls we visited yesterday, looking for a place to lunch.
We’ve actually come here because Eva needs a
toilet and this place was the nicest and cleanest we could see. In our
way after the restroom we can see a KFC and get in to get one menu. Why
only one? Because, as if I was a camel, the reserves from the breakfast
this morning are still here and I don’t feel as I could eat anything
else yet. So while my wife was enjoying her chicken I was looking
around from this third floor. As I promised yesterday, here you have a
couple of pictures of this place:
Suddenly a string quartet starts playing classic music but
for as, being 5:15 PM, it is time for start our return and waking up
from this dream.
We’re at airport at 6:15 PM. I purchase a Lucky Strike box because it’s
like 2€ per pack and I don’t think I’m going to see again Cambodian
prices, but these are still far from what I’ll find at home.
I’ve asked about the chances of being in an emergency exit to the woman
who checked us in and we’ve got seats in the first row of a section of
the plane, so we don’t have seats in front of us, but a wall. For a
moment I’m afraid we’re not going to have screen with movies and games,
but it is actually stored in a side of the seat and is fixed by an
articulated arm we can move at will. This time we’ve got a lot of room
for this flight.
After some movies I try to sleep.
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