Leaving the hostel I felt a bit sad to have to leave behind the nice Alobar in Kathmandu. The 3Howw Hostel was nice and clean and had great little capsules and showers but somehow until this time the Social aspect was missing. No big roof terrace where everyone met in the morning, people coming to the kitchen, not replying to "hey, how are you" and leaving again. I missed my new friends and the Alobar a bit.
But hey, I'm in Bangkok now. It's a big, proper city with loads of high rise buildings with big neon signs and many, many cars and even more mopeds.
So I took the subway and went to the IT Mall, which turned out to open only at 11, so I had another hour to walk around. One thing I should work on is to remember what means thank you in Thai. It took me a couple of days to get this into my head in Nepalese and now it's the same story again in Thai. "Kab buhn Kah" or something.
Once most of the shops were opening and I found the Camera floor I started looking for the exact model I wanted to get. The Panasonic Lumix TZ40, to replace my TZ10 with dirt in the lens. It was hard enough to find a shop (of the more than 20) that actually sold Lumix, but even then none of them were selling the model I was looking for. I found however a shop that sold the TZ60 - top of the line model. Hmmm, should I keep looking, should I ask Basti bring over the Camera I order to his house to Vietnam in 5 weeks, OR should I get the bigger model. I did some research from the coffee place with internet from earlier and decided to go for it. The camera should not be costing more than 14000 Baht.
The price offer started at 12500 Baht and I hoped to haggle him down, but there was no movement at all and it was the only vendor with that cam on offer. Well I went for it and so far (3 days later I don't regret doing so). Also found a power bank on offer and was happy to have spent all that money on electronics.
Next stop was Bangkok main Station as this was close to the main sights of the golden Buddha, Wat Poh, and the royal Palace. While there I purchased my train, bus, ferry combi ticket to Koh Tao for the next evening.
I was getting hungry again and on the way to the golden Buddha found a great little place that was very proud of it's ducks. And right so.
Ideally the power bank was pre-charged and my new camera was able to be charged through USB, so I could even use the time waiting for and consuming the food to charge my new camera.
Then I could use it at the temple of the Golden Buddha, just around the corner from the Duck place to try it out. It was great to try out some of the cool new features. I hope you will also see some improvement in the pictures, there should be some more artistic photos and some better night shots coming soon.
The Golden Buddha has a interesting story behind it but I can't be bothered to write this all down here in the blog, so please ask me next time you see me and I'll tell you the story. :-)
From there my path led me through Chinatown, which didn't have many Chinese shops but narrow little alley ways. Here it started raining, I mean pouring down. Luckily the little alleys and tent-like covers between the buildings on either side offered some protection but it was certainly a good idea to pack away my new acquisition.
I found shelter in a little Mall and had a beer, as the only other option would have been Starbucks.
After the rain stopped (about an hour later) I walked on through a little park to Wat Poh, another palace with loads of Buddhas, including the largest reclining Buddha in the world.
The temple area was really amazing and it was just around the time for sunset so I got some nice pictures out of it. After that I had to check out the infamous Khoa San Road. Not my cup of tea really but it was worth a walk through, maybe I'll come back at night again.
From here I went towards the next train station "National Stadium" to go home and on the way got the victim of an attempted tuk-tuk scam.
A seemingly random local guy tried to give me some advice about cool places to go around the area and told me just to take a tuk-tuk with a yellow license plate. After this friendly guy left a tuk-tuk driver with a yellow license-plated tuk-tuk showed up who suggested to do just this tour. What a coincidence. When I walked on, the area where I was headed for suddenly turned into a zone full of rioting protesters and so on.
Well, I made it out of there, but it's sad, that because of these kind of scams I don't trust so many local people, while I'm sure there are a few nice ones between them that really only want to have a chat with a foreigner.
When I finally got home after a long day out, I met John and Kevin (a new guy) sitting in front of the hostel having a beer. Somehow my plans for the evening changed and I joined them for a quick trip around town. Yvonne from the States also joined us, so we had a girl in the group which would prevent at least some of the dodgy attempts to get us into the strip bars.
Filled with confidence of this thought we headed to Soi Cowboy, the local red-light district and walked down to check out the different places. Pretty attractive girls with very short skirts or pants were lined up along the front of the bars but when we went inside one of them, the girls dancing there were not attractive at all. Their sad, depressed faces certainly not adding to the whole atmosphere.
At least they had cheap beer and a quite good cover band that mainly enjoyed playing Dire Straights.
After the beer we went to the next bar, which was more of a Bar-Bar with no dancing poles. However, the majority of the guests were elder guys with one or two young girls. We had a couple of drinks there and then headed to some sort of club called "glow" on suggestion of Yvonne.
It was pretty small and the music and prices were "clubbish" so I was kinda glad when we got out of there and had a beer with some locals who were still sitting in food joint on the way home (it was about 3 now). It was impossible to fight the guys for the bill, they wouldn't let us pay their or even our beers.
After this long day/night I had no significant problem falling asleep as you can imagine.
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