First Impressions

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We have really been spoilt by friends and family over the past few weeks. Our last ten days were in Skelmersdale with Scotty’s mum, who has been cooking us lots of lovely food and helping us take care of the last few bits and pieces before we leave. Scotty’s Aunty Irene and Uncle Ian treated us to a couple of days in the beautiful Lake District, which was an awesome way to say goodbye to the UK, and I got pretty spoilt by my workmates, who I’m gonna miss a huge amount while we’re away.

We arrived in Bangkok on Thursday morning after nearly 24 hours of travelling. The flight to Bangkok is only around 11 hours from the UK, if you get a direct flight, but we were flying through Amsterdam with a 5 hour stopover in Amsterdam airport. Because of the time of our flight, 6:55am, we left Skelmersdale at 1:30am and so by the time we got to Bangkok we hadn’t slept in nearly 48 hours. By this stage I was a dozy mess and pretty much relying on Scotty to get us to the guest house without falling asleep on the roadside.

The only other places that I’ve been in SE Asia are Singapore and Malaysia, so while Scotty has been here a few times I’m full of first impressions. We took the Sky Train from the airport, managing to catch rush hour on the way. It didn’t drop us anywhere close to where we were staying (oops), but it did give us awesome views of the city. The light was really soft and the city was still covered in haze. It’s a jumble of buildings – rows of identical semi-detached houses, others on stilts over little rivulets, high rises, temples. Masses of wires stretch across the buildings, all held up off the ground as groundwater makes it impossible to bury them beneath it. I’m sure I must have looked massively like a tourist (which I am, so I guess it doesn’t matter), but it did look awesome and besides, the other alternative was staring at the stomach of the gentleman in front of me so I preferred to twist around and look out the window.

After sleeping for several hours we headed down towards Khao San Road for some street food. Khao San Road is the central hub in Bangkok for backpackers, and it’s pretty obvious that everything here is built upon tourism. We were there fairly early in the evening so it wasn’t jammed but still full of backpackers, food stalls and vendors. There are little stalls where you can get massages, and women wandering up and down the street peddling bracelets – instead of calling out or ringing bells, they run a wooden stick along the backs of little wooden frogs to make a chirruping noise. We got some Pad Thai from a market down a little side street, and ate it whilst people watching. Every so often a taxi or Tuk Tuk would creep down in between the throngs of people, and even though I’m a newbie as well I really enjoyed watching peoples’ faces as they got their first glimpses of Bangkok – ranging from excitement and wonder, to bordering upon horror, it’s really not the kind of place that you can shrug off at first glance.

Anyway, it’s taken me two days to write this already and it’s time to move on to writing about more interesting things…stay tuned x

Suu-Min



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