Welcome To Thailand! My Time in Bangkok

Hey folks!

As I already said in the end of my last post, the next stop of my trip was going to be Asia – Bangkok, to be more precise, one of the most famous towns in the world with more than 8 million inhabitants. I was super excited about entering a completely new world. It was a bit later than midnight when I arrived at the airport, so I had to wait some time until I could take the train to my hostel. I arrived there in the morning, already totally exhausted. The reason for that was that the temperatures were simply subtropical – extremely humid and hot. There were almost no other guests at my hostel so I was on my own almost all the time. I would actually lie if I said that I was feeling perfectly good during my first days in Asia. There were many factors contributing to that, such as the weather, the crowdedness of the city, the totally different culture, or the fact that I was on my own again after I had been spending my time with my friends in New Zealand and Sydney before.

I had decided to stay in Bangkok for 4.5 days which turned out to be a little too much as there is not that much to see, to be honest. The temples were definitely worth visiting though. I went to Wat Pho, the Golden Mount, the Royal Palace, the Temple of Dawn (Wat Arun) after taking a boat there across the Chao Phraya river, and some smaller places or temples. So many pyramids, Buddha statues, wall paintings and above all: a lot of golden colour. Besides, a thing that really caught my attention as the popularity of the beloved king Bhumibol who died last October. All over the city, there were giant portraits of him and he is almost treated as a god. I guess his depiction is similar to that of Kim Jong Un in North Korea, the crucial difference being that the Thai really love him. Apart from the religious places, I also went to Lumphini Park, one of the few green areas of the city, to a night market and to the legendary Chatuchak weekend market. It is truly giant. You could spend more than one full day there without seeing the same stalls twice. Moreover, I went up to the Red Sky Bar, one of the numerous rooftop bars in Bangkok. It was pretty impressive to see big parts of the city, especially during the sunset. Otherwise, I tasted a lot of the world famous street food, of course. It is super cheap and you can get almost every kind of food there. I nearly enjoyed all my meals. In general, it was really interesting to see the contrasts in this city. On the one hand, there are climatized shopping malls and trains, just like we know them from the Western world, but on the other hand, you can cleary see that there is also a lot of poverty. Very basic houses and huts could be spotted, sometimes just a few meters away from hyper modern building complexes. On my last evening, I went to the bus terminal and jumped on a highly comfortable and spacy night bus as it was time for my second destination: Chiang Mai.

Since I took quite a lot of photos in Bangkok, I decided to make a separate post on my time in Chiang Mai and Pai. That one might be a bit longer then. However, I still hope you enjoyed reading this post!

Cheers,

Max