Staying cool at Bangkok

Saturday, October 18th

Our overnight train got us to Bangkok at 7am...a bit early for bangkok in general. We dropped our bags off in a luggage hold place and the hopped in a cab to go to central world department store, where we planned to camp out. Unfortunately, it was not open yet, but luckily the starbucks was! Our plan for the day consisted of being indoors and eating polo fried chicken for lunch. We were taking two overnight trains back to back, so we had to keep our bodies cool so we didn't sweat too much. Besides our 10 hour train to surat thani, we also had to take a bus to the pier, and then a 5 hour ferry to koh pha-ngan island. So yeah, a long travel day.

At koh pha-ngan, we are going to stay at a place called the sanctuary. It has daily yoga and meditation classes, so we're excited. Maybe with some relaxing I can actually finish the pile of books I have accumulated - when genius failed, empire of the sun and catfish and mandala.

So our day consisted of sitting in starbucks for the first 4 hours reading and blackberrying. We bought some street food for breakfast. It cost us a whopping 50 baht total ($1.50) for noodles, rice and skewers. Our starbucks drinks cost more than that! We then ventured to HSBC to use the atm, since I lost my commerce bank card, then went to polo fried chicken. It's supposed to be legendary...we thought it was good, not the best, but good and worth the trip.

Since we had no plans for the day, we hopped in a cab to go back to central world. We walked around the ac mall, very nice. It would of been shopping heaven for us if we didn't have to carry anything we bought around the world with us. We did spot a cinema, so we checked out movie times. Guess what we watched? Body of Lies. Leo is so manly these days! Thai cinema is weird. You can get different types of tickets - first class, deluxe and so forth. First class tickets are 700 baht ($21) while deluxe was 160 baht ($5). First class had meals and drinks, deluxe is with dts (we think). We opted for the 160 baht tickets. The movie was good, it was totally worth our time.

Afterwards we stopped by a bookstore so steph could pick up another book and then went to the food court. The food courts are pretty impressive here. It had all types of stuff from different asian cuisines to american sandwiches. It reminded me of the wholefoods cafeteria. I got a noodle soup and steph got a sandwich. Both very satisfying.

By that time we needed to catch a taxi to the train station. Taxi 1-2-3 and we got to the train station an hour before departure time. Our train this time was more ghetto with smaller beds. A lady with a 1 year old baby had the ground bed below me. Her baby was very cute.....until it started crying. Thank goodness grandma was able to shut her up. We would of both been very unhappy campers.

Did I mention steph and I have been hanging out so much that we started to speak the same way? Literally when we meet new people or have convos with them we will say the same thing at the same exact time. Jinx...or maybe just freaky. We also don't need to say anything to each other, but we would know what the other person is thinking.