Pirates of Siam Square

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We read in our travel guide that the best place to go shopping during the week is Siam Square, so we hopped on the sky train today and went to check it out. For the most part we were pretty disappointed as many of the shopping centres there are geared towards people with far more money than we have. If you like brand name shopping, then the Siam Paragon and Central World Plazas are for you.

We mooched around for a while and got talking to a Thai lady who just approached us on the street and seemed keen to practise her English. Normally this would have us on red alert - what does this person want? Why are they talking to us? but for once we found ourselves less suspicious than before. Thai people just seem to be really friendly. If you smile at them, they smile back. If you say hello in Thai, they get all excited and if you say thank you in Thai too, they almost explode with happiness! It's a lovely feeling and meant that chatting to the Thai lady was a fun experience and served to make us feel even more welcome in this already welcoming country.

Towards the late afternoon, we finally found a shopping mall that was more like our kind of thing, full of hundreds of little stalls selling everything from shorts and t-shirts to wooden frogs that sound like they croak when you run a wooden pole along their serrated backs. We bought a little paper lamp with a red and black dragon design on it which was more Chinese than Thai but pretty cool all the same.

We also noticed in the mall that they had a cinema showing loads of movies in English with Thai subtitles for only 100 Baht per person (about £1.30). There were cinemas in the other shopping centres too but they all charged around 500-600 Baht so we gave them a wide berth. One of the films we've been meaning to try and see is Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and the cheap cinema still had a showing for the evening. We bought tickets, headed to the food hall for some cheap nosh - rice with 2 different curries each for only 40 Baht (Glynn managed to unwittingly pick the 2 hottest curries on the menu and suffered for his foolishness so that not even an ice cream could cool him down!!) - and then went in for our movie. The cinema was ultra-modern with air con and comfy seats. Alas the film wasn't up to my expectations but we're still glad we went.

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