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September 22, 2003 : One night in Bangkok

I've arrived in Bangkok after a long flight, and the feelings are overwhelming. This is a really huge city, with lots and lots of people and cars everywhere.
Perhaps I should start from the beginning...

18/9

I flew from Gothenburg to London on Thursday. Sat beside a swedish woman that was flying there to visit her daughter. Spoke to her the whole time, so the time really flew *giggles*
In London, I sat down to catch a break, since there were so many people in line waiting to get their boarding pass, and started talking to a guy from Japan. He had lived four years in Wales, and now he had returned for another year after saving money for a year at home. Although he had lived in UK for four years, I really think my english was better than his... perhaps I'm not the best person to judge that though :)

Since the line for the boarding pass were still very long, I went there and started waiting. I got an older gentleman from England beside me, that was heading for Australia to get married. The woman he was going to marry was a younger woman, a really brilliant lawyer, so after a while he excused himself that he rarely got a chance to say something around her, so he tried to talk as much as possible before he got there... :)
I didn't mind though, he was an old sailor and had a lot of amusing stories to tell, so the hour I spent waiting to get my boardingpass didn't feel very long.

Since the waiting had been so long, I could board my plane right away. I did so, and found out that I had to sit in the left row, the middle seat. Great.
After a while an older english lady with huge glasses arrive, she sat in the isle-seat. At last an australian guy excused himself to get to his seat by the window.
This was going to be an 11 hour long flight, and I barely said a word on the whole time. The australian guy fell asleep even before the plane had left the ground, and didn't wake up until we landed in Bangkok. The english woman seemed just about as interested in speaking to me as I was in her, so the only time we said something to each other was when I had to pass by her to get to the bathroom... It was a very long flight I can tell you. Especially since I couldn't sleep at all, I just slumbered a bit from time to time. I couldn't even watch the movies, because the noise from the engines (I sat "on" the left wing) made it completly impossible to hear the dialogue in the worthless headphones you got from Quantas. Luckily I had my minidisc with me and some good music, so I survived, although it was very very boring.


19/9

Finally I landed in Bangkok, 15.30 local time. Got a tourist visa and had a chat with a german backpacker while I was waiting for my luggage, a bit worried that they had lost it at Heathrow somewhere.
When it showed up, I went outside to find a bus, but first I tried to get a young couple to share a cab with me. Didn't work very well, but after a while we realised we all came from Sweden, so we could at least speak swedish with each other on the bustrip to Khao San Road... :)

For a long while we traveled down a highway with three lanes, so the traffic wasn't really an issue, but when we turned off the highway I understood why people usually describes it as total chaos. Most of the cars here are fairly new and very few have buckles. This is probarbly due to the fact that the traffic moves so extremly slow, but you really have to be impressed by the drivers skills. They always manage to find holes in the traffic that leaves them no more than a centimeter on each side of the car, but that's the way it works here...

After an hour and a half, we finally arrived at our destination, Khao San Road in Bangkok. This must be one of the most bizarre places in the world, and I bet a lot of thai people see it as a free zoo, where they can walk around and look at all the strange tourists coming here. Because this is the place where every traveler that is going to Asia begins their journey. So much people, and almost every single one is white, or at least japanese... not thai anyway.

Anyway... I went to the hostel where I hoped Frank was staying, but he was not living there. So I went to an internetcafe and checked my mail, and I had recieved one from him where he told me where he had spent the last night. I got the guy working at the internetcafe to make me a map, and headed for the Bella bella guesthouse. Unfortunatly he wasn't around, and he had checked out according to them. They didn't have any free rooms though, so I walked back a bit and got myself a room at the Merry V guesthouse, which set me back 120 baht (which is about 3 us dollars - cheap).
Since I was really sweaty by this time, I tried to find a shower. After a while I realised I had to ask someone, and one of the guests told me that you shower where the toilets are. This made me a bit surprised, because what we are talking about here is a room that is like 1.5-2 square metres with a toilet without a seat in it. The room is so small that you almost have to stand in the toilet to be able to open the door, which gives you pretty much the same problem when you are showering. Not fresh at all. The shower felt quite nice though, and after I was done, I lay down on my bed to calm down. Worked fine, so after a while I went out to phone my parents. Costed 150 baht for about 10 minutes, but the phonelines where really bad. At least my mother could calm down a bit when she had heard from me I guess...

I spent some more time on an internetcafe, and got a mail from Frank where he told me where I could find him and Anders the next day. By now it was raining heavily, so I couldn't go out to get food (all I had eaten that day was the really bad breakfast and the airplane), so I had to settle with a piece of bread and a banana. It did taste really good though :)

Spent the rest of the evening in the lobby (if you can call it that), drinking Singha beer (which is a really good Thai beer), writing down my experiences from the day, and then I went to bed at around 1 am.

Posted in: Thailand , Travel by mdk @ 7:22, September 22, 2003 | TrackBack