Bangkok Trip

Sawadicarp! Ha! What's this post without pictures!? The culture in Thailand is really infectious with great food, cheap food and not-so-ugly scenery. (My sis even spotted some guy greeting "sawadicarp" with hands clasped together in e Singapore arrival hall!) The atmosphere's really different! For instance, instead of the disaster of traffic lights and junctions, Bangkok had whistling police managing lesser roads who'll whistle every so often to alert cars or more-commonly, spook the unwary pedestrian. Then again, as a tourist, its either being pedestrian or a rotting corpse on a taxi. Traffic can really crawl during mid-day! We nearly spent an hour on the first day travelling about a mrt station stop to our hotel. Not to mention harrowing spurts of blasting horns from impatient drivers. bah... At least there's a large variety of taxi services around....like the "in"famous tuk-tuk, toyota-corolla taxis, MOTORCYCLE taxis (its a one-way ticket...), river taxis, the mrt, the BTS (Bangkok transit system....an mrt..) -_-" and limosines (those look more like vans..).
Another interesting note is that we finally saw birds again! I never realised that S'pore is now raher bereft of those good-old pigeons until i went to a park there. People actually sell bread crumbs to tourists to feed the birds which i found rather unsettling atrributing to the bird flu pandemic...
Anyway, we reached there around 3am on Sat and woke up for a 1/2 day tour at 7.40 the following day to a collosal temple, a river boat ride & a visit to the floating markets (which was quite a disappointment..) After which began The Routine. We rushed to 1 shopping centre to another from 9+ in the morning to 7+ at night or 9+ if we ate outside. Of oourse, being the lazy sort, we punctuated this ritual with regular stop-offs at the hotel to unload our shopping wares. In short, we functioned like frenzied beavers with an uncanny zest for shopping. ha! In total, i believe we spent more than 15,000 baht on shopping itself (1 baht=4 cents), which is surprisingly little considering all that we bought. =) We all got sore feet in the bargain though... And i wore out my favourite sandals so much that i was coerced to abandon it for a new (cheap) pair there.
I guess what ended the trip right was the airline food! haha! For once, the airline food looked tasty and they didn't give hard cheese with buns....like what Quantas gives. (We took Turkish btw..) I managed to garner my first bottle of red wine on board there too without so much as a blink. ha! Not that i like drinking wine anyway but it was the next best in the absence of earl grey tea. =) All in all...it was a happy, short but truly memorable trip!