Day 1 (Bangkok) - The streets of Bangkok

Streets Of Bangkok from a bridge

We started the 1st day at 9a.m. in Bangkok, very exhausted from the flight. But that didn't keep my father and me from discovering the streets of Bangkok after the check-in at the hotel. So we started in the streets near the hotel. The 1st thing we saw was that you get food everywhere like we saw it in Hanoi 6 years before. Whether at little cook shops directly on the street or in one of the numerous stores like 7Eleven which we saw in nearly every street corner (no exaggeration!).

Everywhere I saw cook shops
on the street

At first we tried some grilled pork meat on sticks from a cook shop on the street, which was very delicious. Then we went along the main road and by doing this we realized how enormous the traffic in Bangkok is. We saw this phenomenon in Hanoi too, but there were motorcycles instead of cars like in Bangkok. Luckily in Bangkok they have many bridges over the roads and traffic lights, so crossing the road was very easy.

Sale! Sale! Sale!
- Shopping center in Bangkok -

After we finished the first walk, we went back to the hotel were we picked up my mother, Sophie and Carina for discovering the city together. So we went again along the main road, discovered some branch roads, exchanged our first Euros in Baht and continued our breakfast on the street. At the early afternoon, we went to one of the main targets for our trip in Bangkok, the local shopping centers. To make one thing clear: This wasn't my idea, I would never visit a city for shopping but I went with ;)

Bangkok has many shopping centers and I can't remember the names of the ones we were inside but that doesn't matter. Because when we were there, we realized how similar these shopping centers were with the ones in Germany. Okay, in Bangkok they were bigger but the prices and the products were nearly the same. I think this is one of the disadvantages of globalization ;)

Shopping center
- Impressive from the outside -

But because we went to the shopping centers, we also used the Skytrain for the first time, the most important public transportation vehicle besides the metro. It is also really fast and in combination with the metro you can go to nearly every point in Bangkok very quick. Apart from the area with the temples like "Wat Pho" were the government will expand the Metro lines in the next three years as we will learn later. Because the tickets were so cheap, first we had always to go to the next service desk and exchange our big banknotes into a lot of 10-Baht coins for the ticket machine. In the end, every drive of the Skytrain cost each one of us about 25 Baht, which is about 0.70 Euros. In comparison to the prices of our German tram in Leipzig, we just payed about 60% of the price we would pay in Leipzig. And it was much faster.


After the disappointment at the shopping centers, we went to one of the night markets in Bangkok at the evening. It was very crowded and so it was difficult for Sophie and Carina to find acceptable clothes. We others weren't the target group I guess because we only saw things for young women. And like our young women told me, the quality of the products weren't good. So this shopping tour wasn't very efficient too. For dinner, we went into a Japanese restaurant with good quality and good prices for tourists. Then we finished our trip at the night markets, because afterwards the rain started to fall very heavy and we decided to go back to the hotel.

Advertisement vs. Reality
- A meal in a Japanese restaurant -

To bring the evening to a good end, my father and me decided to go to the bar in the hotel and to drink a beer. I have to say that the "Cheng-Beer" I ordered was good, also in comparison with German beer like "Ur-Krostitzer" that I usually drink. As father and son we talked about the happenings of the day, the next days of the journey and my upcoming future. The last part was the most important for me, because I wanted to use this journey to find a clear and ambitious direction for my future. It was very successful because it wasn't hard to find out that I want to go abroad for a few years. My father went to Germany when he was 18 and he was able to build up his own family and future in a country which was foreign for him. So he had a lot of useful experiences for me like starting to build up a circle of friends in a new city immediately, because no one can do such a thing alone.

Traffic during the night
Maybe the same like the one at day ;)

One curiosity was a man from the USA who worked for the "Worldbank Group" and spontaneously talked with us. What was strange at the first moment, was in the end a luckily coincidence because this man told us that he was originally from Switzerland, traveled a lot in his job and had 3 children who are also living in different countries. So from his point of view I got a lot of important aspects and things I had to think about regardless if his whole story was true or not. What was the conclusion of the evening? I got some new thoughts which I have to solve for my own and I was confirmed in my way of thinking that regardless what others think, I should follow my goals and should really work with 100% on them. Let's see how this will end ;)

In the next post, I will tell you about our 2nd day in Bangkok and how we were tricked and in the same way how we tricked the tricksters in the end. And please excuse the (not so high) quality of my written English. If there is something you cannot understand, just write me a comment and I will reply as fast as I can.