Akihabara, Bangkok style

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Today was interesting actually. We started off by heading to the Grand Palace only to find out from a tuk tuk driver that it was closed on Saturdays and Sundays until 15:00. Then he offered to take us to a few other places around the city for 20 baht, 10 each! “What’s going on?” we wondered…that’s only $1 for quite a trip. We paid him in advance (Ronald was worried he would ask for 20 dollars after, so we figured we would just go ahead and pay him and be done with it) and he took us to a couple of temples and also to a couple of shops. This was funny because we were totally being taken advantage of and used for his selfish purposes…each place we went in to gave him a coupon and he told us. I thought it was great he wasn’t sugarcoating it and just asked us to go in so he could get his coupon. I much prefer this sort of exploitation to what we experienced in Cambodia.

Anyways, at one of the wats he dropped us off and there was a 150 baht charge to go in, so we decided not to and walked back to the road where we came from but our driver was nowhere to be found. We waited for a little over 10 minutes (maybe he ran a quick errand?) and then just started walking to find another tuk tuk to take us somewhere else.

As I mentioned before (I think), Ronald bought a sim card for his 3G USB so he could have internet wherever we are, but it didn’t work. When we went into a store yesterday to ask, the guy didn’t know anything about unlocking the device but gave Ronald a piece of paper with the name of a place with a lot of stores selling technology. Well, the paper got lost but luckily at one of the wats today another man told us to go to “Pantipasa” as I understood and repeated to others. We agreed to 100 baht with a taxi driver instead of using the meter and I think that was a good decision because the traffic was horrible.

We got there about a half hour later and walked into a building a lot like Akihabara in Japan, a large technocenter called “Pantip Plaza”. There were five floors and we walked around four of them in search of a 16 GB sim card for me (I filled up my 8 already) and help for Ronald’s 3G sim card. He ended up paying 150 for his card (the one he bought at Big C was only for cell phones) but saw it on another floor for 99. I walked around a while and ended up paying 749 baht for my card and we also splurged on some tiny but awesome speakers for 450.

Leaving was more difficult because of the hoards of people and cars outside the IT center but we got a tuk tuk for 100 back to Khao San and then went to ask about how to get to Koh Tao, our next stop and an island about 12 hours south of here. We checked at one place we got help at yesterday and they also gave us a recommendation of where to go to get Ronald’s hair dyed green again because now it has faded into a sort of whitish bluish gray. We never found the place recommended to us, but asked at another and for 1600 baht, they’ll cut and dye it with the stipulation of half the pay should it turn out a different color like all the other times.

After the first dye, it was white, a large improvement from the chick yellow he had in Hanoi – things are looking up! Or so we thought. Now it’s a dark purple. It was green for about five minutes, so we’re gonna try again tomorrow at noon. Fingers crossed it works out.

While Ronald was having his hair done I went to buy our tickets and priced the same thing in many agencies and they were all the same so I went to the first guy and bought them there for 900 each. So we leave tomorrow and the plan is to check out, leave our bags at the tour office, go to the grand palace, buy some shirts for Ronald, buy some flip flops for me, and be back at the office for the 19:50 pickup. Hope all goes well!

Technical Details
* most of the signs are also written in English, but a lot of the time they are misspelled! This has been consistent throughout our whole trip so far and is a strange thing for me…if you had a business, wouldn’t you check first before printing?
* you have to pay 10 baht per roll of toilet paper at some of the guest houses
* almost all of the hair salons offer massages, body waxing, manicures, pedicures, and sometimes even eyelash perms
* in some places they sell homemade whisky on the streets from large jars; 10 baht per shot

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Photos

big buddha
they were raising the yellow cloth

black monks
for luck