The top left picture is Daniel and Terence's breakfast in the hotel! Anyway, Sern Hong and I settled on having porridge with pig intestines which tasted rather good. It was a roadside kind of stall with just 3-4 tables combined on either side of the road. The you tiao was super crispy but tasted nicer than expected = probably due to the reusage of cooking oil!
Funnily enough, we met Terence and Daniel there and they were buying fruit! They came to us while we were eating, with iced cofees which were yummy! We faced a bit of drama while buying mangosteen. It was hard to communicate and we were wondering if the sign said 15 baht for 100g or 1 kg. There was a nice guy who helped with the exchange. He even took one mangosteen and opened it for us to try! Nothing much happened except Daniel and Terence tried to corss the very busy road to get back to the hotel while Sern Hong and I took the overhead bridge!
We went back to wash up and get ready for Chatuchak market. There was a non-meter taxi driver waiting for us just as we stepped out of the hotel. He made us take a detour to the gem-making place where I'd been before. This time however, we just walked through most of it without really taking in the magnificence of the gems. In the end I bought a silk hankerchief. Maybe I'll give it to my mother or use it to decorate my table! The driver who took us there got 2 vouchers.
When we finally reached the market, we realised that the layout was insane! It was really huge and there was just no way to see from one end to the other. There were just endless lanes that went on and on.
The market was divided in less than subtle ways, with area being allocated to certain kinds of goods, like denim, bags, etc. We spent hours walking in there and it's impossible not to break into sweat. I had a couple of good finds there. However compared to the many things I saw there were only a minute number of things that caught my eye. The place captured my imagination and creative side as the variety of things available was just immense. Bought quite a few stuff that when I went back to the hotel to try them out, I was kind of impressed by my taste!
We had lunch; something that we weren't longing for but was grateful to have. It was a nice break from shopping, but it sort of broke the momentum!
When we reached the hotel in the comforts of a taxi, it was already very late because we were stuck in the rush hour jam! Being very bored, we took quite a lot of photos while in the traffic jam - a cheap means to entertain ourselves!
Anyway, we all laid out our shopping and I took a photo of mine before trying them out. They fitted rather well, with some of them on the somewhat tight side. Oops. I don't like my clothes baggy.
Had an insane time taking photos of myself in my new clothes. Narcicistic. Terribly.
We washed up and changed into fresh clothes before taking a tuk-tuk down to a Chinese restaurant. The food there was quite expensive and we had a shocke when we saw the menu!
However, we had pineapple rice and tom yam soup. It makes my mouth water just thinking about it. The rice was also amazing. Even though the serving wasn't satisfying, but we all felt that it was worth the money.
To our surprise, it started raining very heavily the moment we got out. Thus we cancelled our plans to go Chinatown. Also the tuk-tuk driver charged an exhorbitant price for us to go anywhere, probably because of the rain and the fact that he was the only one around in the restaurant. We crossed the main road (illegally) in search of more tuk-tuks. We asked directions from this very friendly couple, with the female being more proficient in English, talking to us more. She introduced us to a couple of shopping places and pointed them out on the map and suggested alternate forms of transport to get there.
In the end, after a fruitless bargain with a couple of tuk-tuk drivers, we decided to take the DTS skytrain. For the uninitiated, the ticketing system worked pretty much the same way as our old one, but I doubt the generation after mine can remember much of it!
The good thing about the train design was that there was a circular bar on top for you to hold once you got through the door instead of just a single pole which people would fight to grip on to for balance.
We reached Siam station and the place for shopping was meant for the extremely rich. The three shopping centres situated next to each other screamed of obscence extravagance, which was kind of scary. Maybe it's because we weren't used to looking at things which cost 4-digits in Baht! There were TV screens at the linkways. Bloody cool stuff. On the way we also saw humungous posters of Adidas soccer ads all over the place. In addition to that, Daniel spotted Ekin Cheung! He wasn't very tall in person, and his complexion wasn't that good either. However he was quite well built and had the presence. He was walking very fast though!
We went to Siam Paragon next and it lived up to its name as the Paragon of Siam. Imagine our Paragon, then throw in a basement with amazingly high ceilings, posher decor, huge fish tanks in the food court, crystal clear glass, an underwater world, and a spacious layout. I think a couple of buildings should be knocked down with this concept built in its place! (Preferably somewhere other than Orchard Road!) We stopped at the Macdonald's for a break. Daniel went to buy a drink while SH went to get ice-cream.
The night was still young and we had money to spend (just not at Paragon!) so we took a trip to the Suan Lam Night Bazaar. I've been there before but this time the shopping was a lot more extensive. Didn't manage to buy much except a stuffed Eeyore for my sister. I remembered that The Big C was situated just around the corner but we were too late to go there. IAnyway, there was a performance going on on the stage, right in front of where a lot of people were eating. They performed all sorts of English songs, pretty decently too. It formed the soundtrack of my shopping trip over there.
It was an incredibly tiring day, but a fulfilling one!
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