Bangkok

…Hmmmm Bangkok, where do you start?! Ok, so arriving by bus at 5am is probably the wrong time to be getting your first feel of the city – especially Khao San Road, the main hub of backpacker land and everything that is bad about the city, or good, I guess depending on your reasons for being here! 24 hour drinking is in full swing here as drunken English and Australians stumble from bar to curb and on to bar again everywhere. Young Thai girls, boys or a cross between the 2 occompany Western guys to cash points to withdraw cash for ‘Services rendered’ if you know what I mean. Young guys fall out of Go-Go bars amazed at the things Thai girls can do with ping pong balls. Old men saunter around the street with young pretty Thai girls in tow looking all proud of themselves! Basically anything goes here and at 5am it ticks all the boxes of what you’d expect from Bangkok. So having hid in a coffee house away from all the reprebates and degenerates for a few hours it was finally time to check into the hostel and get a couple of hours kip. Next thing on the list of things to do was to head over to the British Embassy and arrange new passports as we had both run out of pages on ours (such international jetsetters us!). Sitting in the waiting room of the Embassy I felt a little out of place with my fellow Brits, it appeared that I was the only one there without a Thai girl trying to convince the Embassy that they do love each other and she should come back to England (they were mainly Northerners) to live without being forced to work the streets or in a factory, to not be hassled by drunk Englishmen everynight and not having ping pong ball jokes thrown at them constantly… er sorry, my mistake, that is what they are taking them home to!!
Anyway, new passports are on order and its now time to see what else the city has to offer, can’t all be bad and seedy! Stunning temples and Wats are scattered around the city, a trip round the Grand Palace, a river ferry ride through the middle of town, a wander through a city park, a visit to the Reclining Buddha – all very pleasant and perfectly normal, in fact it is actually quite a nice city. Like all Asian cities it also has its fair share of shopping malls, but if the ones in Singapore are big and fancy there is one here that is just damn right mental! One section of it looks and feels like it was designed by a group of teenagers that had just watched MTv for 3 days solid complete with TV station, radio station, band stage, catwalk, graffiti and more, the next building has an aquarium, Ferrari show room, fairground and the biggest and fanciest cinema going where at the start of the film (yes, one hungover day we decided to hide in the cinema!) you have to stand and sing the national anthem – the only shopping mall we’ve been in yet that I’d actually suggest going to because of its mentalness but not if you need new trekking shoes, its seems no one in Thailand has feet bigger than a size 9! So thats basically it, we survived 3 days, didn’t go in a Go-Go bar, didn’t see any ping pong shows, didn’t get a massage, didn’t go to a Thai boxing fight, didn’t go to a clinic for gender re-assignment, ordered 2 new passports without getting one for a Thai girl, didn’t get drunk every night – only once having randomly bumped into 2 friends from back home who were sitting in the same bar!! But that was enough things we didn’t do, so it was time to move on, especially as we need to come back in 2 weeks time to pick up our passports so if there was anything else that we didn’t do this time round we will always get a chance not to do it next time!