Thailand I - Welcome to Bangkok

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I’ve never had such a violent reaction against a city as I had in Bangkok. You can’t see the sky through a thick layer of grey smog clouds. The buildings are tall, but unimpressive. Everything is grey. Aside from ‘the Pentagon’ shopping mall (whose mark-up on all European-founded designer goods was horrendous), the shops sucked. The street fashion was mundane, at best.

I have 5 fond memories of that city:

Sitting in an on-line gaming cafe at 10pm, using msn. I was feeling quite sorry for myself and looking puffy-eyed and quite pathetic, when Ollie logged on, told me to buck-up and that he was coming to visit me in Chiang Rai as soon as I got there. I am almost certain that if he hadn’t done that I’d have given Thailand two fingers and hopped on the first plane to Hong Kong, and then home.

Eating crispy salmon skin with salmon roe sushi and tuna sashimi in an adorable all-wood-decor Japanese restaurant, reading UK Vogue, trying to ‘buck-up’.

A boat ride down the Chao Phrayer River, which made the Thames water look like Evian.

Drinking on a roof-top bar until the early hours and then stumbling into our TEFL course the next day, with no sleep, dressed up like tarts.

Devon being chatted up by 2 Swedish or Norwegian (regardless, broken-English speaking) blokes in Kao San Road, who we shared a cab with to get to a nearby club. Devon puked all over one of them in the cab and he still paid for the ride and all the goodies we made the taxi pull-over for at a 7-Eleven store.

And perhaps I’m being overly harsh; there were several positives. While as a ‘ferang’ you were obviously being conned whenever you purchased anything from a stall, everything was still significantly cheaper than in the UK. Especially taxis and tuk-tuks. I also never felt unsafe, even in some of the infamously sketchier areas at night, although perhaps this was accountable to most people mistaking me for a Thai girl; the blondes in the group maybe felt more out of place.

To me Bangkok is a city that isn’t as intriguing , innovative or even as interesting as Tokyo, it is not as fashionable as Hong Kong and it doesn’t home a financial district (or department stores!) anywhere near as impressive as that of London. Kao San road is good for cheap cocktails, but being kicked out of clubs at 2am, into a bumpy, open-air tuk-tuk doesn’t do it for me. The food isn’t great and the people were not noticeably happier, nor friendlier, than in any other city I’ve been to. I could do without going back here ever again; not a great start