Busy Day in Bangkok

So, on Friday I decided I needed goals. I need objectives. I needed to get things done!

And then I went back to sleep. (hey, I’m on vacation!)

I left the hostel at about noon thinking about lunch. It is so easy to not eat a lot when it is so hot. I find I am averaging two meals a day with various fruit drinks thrown in throughout the day. On Thursday I had gone to Terminal 21 – this humongous mall a few station stops from the hostel.

The mall is a trip! Literally. They’ve designed it like an airport (kind of). Each floor is a different destination and there are small scale models of famous landmarks and the stores are designed to fit in with the theme. So you can go to Istanbul or London or Rome or San Francisco. This is all fun and I’ll take some pictures on another trip but the best part of the mall is that on the fifth floor there is huge food court.

It is the floor above San Francisco so it has a Pier 21 feel to it (I think you can even buy the famous clam chowder in a bread bowl:) You buy a card that you’ve ‘charged’ with however much you want to spend (you can redeem it for any leftover cash) and then you go around and decide what you want to eat. There are proper sit down restaurants around the perimeter but in the middle are different food and drink vendors. And you can eat a meal for under 100Baht (like $3.50). Here are some pictures of my meal on Friday.

One vendor sells only vegetarian food so I can’t tell you exactly what everything is but it involves rice, vegetables, soya, fresh basil, bean sprouts and a cabbage salad. My second favourite vendor sells fruit ices. This was my second day in a row asking for passion fruit (they advertise it as a choice). I reminded the woman who works there that I had been looking forward to a passion fruit drink all day. She advised that passion fruit was not in season so she was having trouble getting it. However, she went in the back and asked her staff to give me one of the few she had purchased. Here it is (I'd eaten the first half when I realized I should probably take a photo:):

What a lovely gesture! I decided on watermelon juice instead.

After eating I was in search of a place to get threaded. For those of you who don’t know, threading is a way of removing hair from the face and body that doesn’t involve shaving, waxing or chemicals. People who do this use two threads to pull the hair out of you without a great deal of discomfort or time. Dear had said she had not discovered a place in Bangkok so I turned to the ‘net and in no time I was headed to Khoobsurat. It was one more skytrain stop over. After I had taken a walk down the road it was meant to be on I was discouraged but had ‘found’ a Bangkok institution – “Cabbages and Condoms” – a restaurant that is a social enterprise – putting money into population control programs. There is all sorts of information in the menu, you get a condom instead of a mint when you pay the bill and there is a great shop that sells all sorts of themed items. I will be going back to buy a few gifts and to support a good cause.

Since I was there I had coconut water. Here it is:

 

Yep – just the coconut (and a flower for decoration). Yummy!

So, I re-traced my steps looking more carefully at the shops. Of course I hadn’t written the address down, just general instructions. But I located the shop. It was in a mall, a bit off the street. The women working there were great. In no time flat, I had a much smoother complexion and had listened to an Indian woman speak in Hindi/Thai. It was pretty cool.

Take care.