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Our flight from SFO left at 1am on Saturday, September 8th.. Every time I told people when my flight was, they would respond with “Oh.. Friday night.” Hmmm. Is 1am on Saturday technically part of “Friday Night?” I mean — to me, 1am Saturday is part of Saturday morning, but apparently to many people, it’s part of “Friday Night.” Weird. But I digress.

Jenny and I were on the same flight, which went from SFO to Taipei, and then we switched planes for Bangkok. The 15 hours of flying went by surprisingly easily, and after a lot of sleeping, a few movies, and two tasty meals (I like airplane food, yum), Jenny and I arrived in BKK.

Thailand Tip #1: When taking a cab from the airport, make sure you get a TAXI METER cab, and ask to use the meter — if they quote you a price, it’s probably too high.

We hopped a cab to the hotel where Paul was staying, and got ourselves settled.. it was like 11am, so we had some time before Korby arrived at like 5pm, so we headed to check out the famous Bangkok malls that both world-travelers Pius and Chad had told me about. Yay! We traveled halfway around the world to go to a mall!

We went to Central World, which is a huge mall in the middle of Bangkok… it was like 90 degrees with like 90 percent humidity outside, so my SF-acclimatized self was happy to get into the aircon for a bit. Since it was a Sunday, there was a huge market going on in the downstairs part of the mall, so that was fascinating to see all of the people milling about, doing their grocery shopping at an open-air style market, in a mall. Most of the other stuff in the mall would have looked pretty at home in the states — designer boutiques, clothing stores, electronics, etc… And the prices of the fancy stuff were just about the same as back home too. They were selling down jackets at the Hugo Boss store that we went into. Yah, um, that’s nice.

We did some of the touristy stuff, saw the Grand Palace, and took a longtail to see the canals in Thonburi..

Check out this cool cat that was just hanging out in some shrine in the flower market:

I checked out a Muay Thai Boxing match.. I had front row seats which seemed only to be filled with other tourists, since it was like 2,000 Baht, which is kind of a lot of money, but whatever, I was able to get the tickets for 1,800 — maybe that was a deal, maybe not.. who knows.

Thailand Tip #2: You will be ilked out of some money by some wily people. Oh well.

Thailand Tip #3: Tuktuks will take you for a fun ride. You may not end up where you tell them to go, but it will be fun.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under thailand, trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.