Day 4 and Day 5, Bangkok

Day 4

Cheryl and I took a bus to Pattaya from Mo Chit Bus terminal. You can take a sky train to Mo Chit Station and then take a taxi to the bus terminal. (the bus fare to Pattaya was 128 baht) It’s a 2 ½ bus ride to Pattaya.


This is our mandatory bus photo. We have taken many bus photos together over the years. Many of the bus photos are on the way to Singapore. We just had to take another one for old times sake.

I knew that the beaches at Pattaya were not fantastic as compared to places like Phi Phi and Krabi. But since we are already in Bangkok and we've heard so much about Pattaya, we decided to head there anyway.


Taking the tuk tuk


Pattaya during the day. We saw lots of young girls working behind the bars. I just shudder at the thought of what they do when the sun sets. In Pattaya, there are lots of white men with receding hairline and a potbelly walking around hand-in-hand with young Thai girls. Cheryl and I relayed our Pattaya experience to a friend back in the hostel. He replied, 'Maybe they are really in love.' We crooked an eyebrow and said, 'Yeah, he is in love with her body and she is in love with his money.'


Aside from dodgy old men, we saw the beach and the sea. We didnt manage to make it to the beautiful island (forgot the name) off Pataya. It was a long, long story. Basically, this horrible, conniving lady boss of the speedboat we were on, tried to scam us of our money and would have left us stranded in the island had we not tell the boatman to send us back to Pattaya. We made threats to call the police and we found out that the tourism board at Pattaya was corrupted and was collaborating with the lady boss. Sigh. Anything is possible in Thailand. Here I was thinking that Malaysia was bad.


After the messy affair, we roamed the streets of Pattaya, had lunch and then laze around by the beach


There were hundreds of red deck chairs complete with big blue umbrellas




Being silly

After our day at Pattaya, we headed back to Bangkok.


Day 5

Day 5 was meant to be a full day of shopping as it was our last day. But Cheryl who is my alarm clock did not set her alarm clock (see how I like to play the blame game? Kidding :P I'm too dependent on her sometimes) So I woke up at 10 am, stared at my phone, shouted at Cheryl to get out of bed, panicked, quickly packed our stuff and rushed out of there.


Headed to Siam Paragon first. Siam Paragon is an upper-class shopping mall. They have many zen design shops and other modern looking shops. Cheryl loves those kinda places.




We headed to Central World after. This is Keith. We met him in the hostel as well. He was our shopping buddy for the day.


An open-concept shop.


Hm...who knows what we were doing?


Another art exhibition


I love this painting. Element of seduction yet innocence. Perhaps its about the red light district in Thailand? Well that's my interpretation anyway.


Nice 3-d effect


I think it was someone's piece of art? I helped them modify it a little :P


By the way, this is a night shot of Central World.

Note of advice: If youre only planning to visit two main shopping centres, visit Central World and Siam Paragon. They both remind me of Pavillion in KL actually. They are both pretty.


Here's our sad story about Chinatown. After the shopping centres, we headed to Chinatown but there wasn't anything much there. The little roadside stalls were not up yet. No little titbits to try. Sob. Two days before, we wanted to head to Chinatown at night. We told a tuk tuk driver to bring us there but he told us, 'Why go Chinatown now? Chinatown is empty. Only stray cats.' Not having been to Chinatown and because we didnt ask anyone else for advice, we asked him on places we could go instead. Guess we ended up? He brought us to this expensive seafood restaurant which we refused to patron upon seeing the place. Obviously, he receives a commission from the restaurant.

Only stray cats! Hmph. I'll always remember that. It feels like everyone in Thailand was out to squeeze us of our money. Sometimes we were careful and sometimes, we weren't as careful. But I guess all these misadventures are part of the fun of travelling. There won't be any interesting stories to tell without any misadventures.

That basically ended our Bangkok trip.


Here's a picture of us in the plane with my flowers in the background =)

Places that I have missed and would like to do in my next Bangkok trip:
- Go for a Thai boxing match (Apparently, getting a VIP seat for 2000 baht is worth it)
- Head to Chinatown at night