Bangkok Weekend

Bangkok: 10 Million People living in the Land of Smiles.

We have just got back from a weekend in Bangkok. Actually it was a Monday, Tuesday and fly home on Wednesday morning weekend. What an interesting place! Ruth and I had a really great time. It just happened to be their Songkrang festival. Which is the equivalent of Thailand’s Lunar New Year. It's a National Holiday for three days and it seemed to me that the whole city was involved in a water fight. Songkrang is the Lunar New Year celebration when Buddha images are bathed, and a lot of water is generally tossed around. Everywhere we went there were people on corners splashing a lot of water about. Large numbers of young people were on the streets with loaded water guns freely wetting each other. In fact every time we ventured out doors we ended up wet, it was a lot of fun. The temperatures were up around 34 + degrees so being wet was quite good and everyone seemed very happy.

We did the usual tourist type activities. We stayed in Sukhumvit, very close to the sky train, so we used this to get around. We also found our way down to the river and spent an afternoon cruising and exploring the various stops up and down the river. We managed to find our way to the temple of the Emerald Buddha and the Palace. What an amazing place, there were so many gold covered statues, with loads of ornately covered buildings. Because it was an important public holiday there also happened to be lots of people out and about.

We enjoy exploring night markets when we are travelling so we thought we would Patpong night market as we were told that it is a good Market to go to. We set of in the evening on the sky train to Sala Daeng, which was the right stop to get off. We got off the train and were immediately aware of lots of noise, a steady hum of crowd, banging, and loud voices. Wondering what was going on we looked over the side of station and we were absolutely gob-smacked with what we saw. As far as we could see was a wave of people, with buckets of water raining down on them. They were all happy and having a great time. They were tightly packed together getting out of the station and to our destination was going to be very difficult so we opted to stand and enjoy the atmospgere from our safe viewing platform instead. Finally we made the decision to return to Sukhumvit and find somewhere to have dinner and watch the fun going on in our local neighborhood.

We enjoyed Bangkok and were surprised by how easily we found our way around. We thought the people were very easy going and happy which to date has been our experience with other Thailand destinations. The impression that will last in my brain is the contrasts from very poor people begging in the street and right next door very rich people in expensive cars and clothes. Very run down buildings with amazing expensive examples of modern architecture right next door. Finally the water freely splashed around, with polluted canals and river providing vital transport links. Lots of smiles and loads of contrasts.