After braving the sweltering heat to partake in Bangkok's religious temples, we turned our attention to the secular temples of modern Bangkok life: shopping, eating and go-go bars.
Shopping
The shopping in Bangkok is non-stop and the Thai's are some of the most practiced shoppers we have encountered. At the heart of the city lies Siam Center, in our humble opinion the largest temple to mass commercialism ever built. There are multistory glimmering glass shopping malls as far as the eye can see and the street level shopping was a chaotic collection of shoebox sized stores featuring various local and Chinese sourced knock-off goods. Naturally, ML was in her element and made it her personal mission to leave no stone unturned for fantastic fashion. All the western staples were represented, as well all the fawned-over-but-can-never-afford European brands, but ML was in search of local influences and Bangkok didn't disappoint. For creative and local design, ML would argue that Bangkok has some of the best shopping in the world. Her favorite was the 4-story mall dedicated only to locally designed and produced Thai fashion. Needless to say, ML was in heaven, and AB loved the air-conditioning.
After satisfying our appetite for local Thai fashion, we felt prepared to tackle one of the largest markets in the world, Chatuchak Weekend Market. Simply the largest market in Thailand, it covers over 35 acres with 5,000+ stalls, and is wall to wall with goods and people. The entire market is divided up into sections based on the items the sell including clothing, home furnishings, handicrafts, religious artifacts, collectibles, foods, and live animals. The entire place is similar to Thailand a hot,dirty mess. The stalls are cramped together with about 3 feet of walking room between them and shopping is more akin to losing one's self in a maze, but you can't beat the bargains, or the people watching.
The highlights of our trip Chatuchak was seeing the live animals, you can literally buy anything here - CNN did a special on the illegal exotic live animals they sell here but we couldn't find many of them. However, we did find birds, really young puppies (too young-like just born), squirrels (illegal), and amphibians (snakes, frogs, etc.).
We especially liked the artwork they had on display and AB purchased a monster-sized pallet knife painting that was "listed" for $1000 but negotiated down to $350 (you can see it in the 2nd photo below).
Side note: We are constantly amazed at how poorly dressed tourists are, specifically backpackers and the expats, especially around known "backpacker districts" like Khoa San Road in Bangkok. In every country we visited without fail, the local's, even with their very limited means, were all ways dressed respectful in public. However, visiting poor nations somehow gives tourists, mostly westerns, the vague idea that they should impersonate the homeless from their own countries and never showering or washing their clothes. It became a real pet peeve of ours to witness how crass and disheveled the tourists looked. There is hope however, most were not American's. In fact, the American's we saw were usually just loud and easily identifiable by their pleated Khaki's with sneaker look. In our opinion the worst offenders were typically Dutch, German, English, French and Russian (that is a whole blog post itself, they are like the world's cockroaches).
Food
The food scene in Bangkok was awesome. Unlike the states, most Thai take their meals in al fresco dining establishments set along side the road and continually nosh throughout the day on street food (unfortunately, sanitation is still a big gamble as evidenced by our dining companion in the photo below). Walking the street in Bangkok is a continual smell of delicious foods being cooks, grilled, roasted and fried. In the states, one of our favorite foods is Pad Thai, so we made a personal mission to try to find the best Pad Thai in Thailand. Since it only sells for about $1.5 on the street, every stand we passed we made it a point to sample their wares. Overall, we were feeling a bit downtrodden as nothing really surpassed the Pad Thai we could get at home, till our fortunes changed on our last night in Bangkok. The prior night, we decided to splurge a little and visit the top rated restaurant in Bangkok to enjoy some fantastic green & red curry (two dishes that have no equal at home) and luckily ran into our chef on his smoke break. He suggested we find a local night market, that set up shop on a side street after 6:00 pm and there, in his humble opinion, was the holy grail of Pad Thai. His palate was spot on, we found the fabled Pad Thai master on Soi 38 and had the best Pad Thai ever (we actually ordered a second round and took some home to eat).
Overall, our favorite Thai dishes ended up being mainstays of most Thai restaurants at home, however, in Thailand these dishes were elevated to all new levels. The produce was fresh, the fruit bought at street-side stalls was ripe, succulent and delicious and we experimented with new tastes like dragon fruit, red plums and jack fruit. The curries were sublime and always contained a subtle heat which the cold beer always took care of . Oddly enough some of the best meals we had were in shopping mall cafeteria's, unlike the states which mainly contain unhealthy fast food shops, the malls in Asia had huge food centers serving out amazing and relatively low priced Thai staples. BTW, yes those are deep fried grubs and crickets.
While in Bangkok, we had an opportunity to catch up with some fellow travelers from DC. Eden, a Georgetown SigEp, and his girlfriend, Mariclaire. We visited Cabbages & Condoms, an NGO whose profits help achieve their mission of providing condoms to poor, rural Thai communities. Below is "Condom Clause" and Tiger "Protect your" Woods.
Go Go Bars
No review of Bangkok would be complete with mentioning the abundance of destinations related to Sex Tourism. According to the guide books and people we spoke with, Thailand has always had a long standing open interpretation of sexuality and extremely forgiving of sexual vice. They are very open to gays and lesbians and many of the "lady-boys" or cross dressing Thai's, can be seen openly in the street. The big explosion of sexual tourism for Thailand happened during the Vietnam war, when GI's would frequent the capital on leave. After the war, an enterprising GI set down in Bangkok and started the now famous go-go bar, Cowboy. With this first establishment, go go bars exploded and prostitution was rampant in the city. The main areas for prostitution now are located in Soi Cowboy and Patpong - home to the famous ping-pong shows and enough neon lights and scantily clad women touting cheap drinks and good times to put Las Vegas to shame.
We saw tons of young Thai women with older white gentlemen throughout our time there and during our nights out you would see whole groups of western men frequenting the go-go bars. Originally our thoughts were of the poor women who are typically sold into this line of work, but we were amazed to find out a third of prostitutes were children and over 75% of John's are of Asian decent, the Westerns just stick out more and have more cash. One guide book stated it bluntly, Thai's typically don't brush trash under the carpet they just let it pile up, and once it is big enough they call it furniture.
Shopping
The shopping in Bangkok is non-stop and the Thai's are some of the most practiced shoppers we have encountered. At the heart of the city lies Siam Center, in our humble opinion the largest temple to mass commercialism ever built. There are multistory glimmering glass shopping malls as far as the eye can see and the street level shopping was a chaotic collection of shoebox sized stores featuring various local and Chinese sourced knock-off goods. Naturally, ML was in her element and made it her personal mission to leave no stone unturned for fantastic fashion. All the western staples were represented, as well all the fawned-over-but-can-never-afford European brands, but ML was in search of local influences and Bangkok didn't disappoint. For creative and local design, ML would argue that Bangkok has some of the best shopping in the world. Her favorite was the 4-story mall dedicated only to locally designed and produced Thai fashion. Needless to say, ML was in heaven, and AB loved the air-conditioning.
After satisfying our appetite for local Thai fashion, we felt prepared to tackle one of the largest markets in the world, Chatuchak Weekend Market. Simply the largest market in Thailand, it covers over 35 acres with 5,000+ stalls, and is wall to wall with goods and people. The entire market is divided up into sections based on the items the sell including clothing, home furnishings, handicrafts, religious artifacts, collectibles, foods, and live animals. The entire place is similar to Thailand a hot,dirty mess. The stalls are cramped together with about 3 feet of walking room between them and shopping is more akin to losing one's self in a maze, but you can't beat the bargains, or the people watching.
The highlights of our trip Chatuchak was seeing the live animals, you can literally buy anything here - CNN did a special on the illegal exotic live animals they sell here but we couldn't find many of them. However, we did find birds, really young puppies (too young-like just born), squirrels (illegal), and amphibians (snakes, frogs, etc.).
We especially liked the artwork they had on display and AB purchased a monster-sized pallet knife painting that was "listed" for $1000 but negotiated down to $350 (you can see it in the 2nd photo below).
Side note: We are constantly amazed at how poorly dressed tourists are, specifically backpackers and the expats, especially around known "backpacker districts" like Khoa San Road in Bangkok. In every country we visited without fail, the local's, even with their very limited means, were all ways dressed respectful in public. However, visiting poor nations somehow gives tourists, mostly westerns, the vague idea that they should impersonate the homeless from their own countries and never showering or washing their clothes. It became a real pet peeve of ours to witness how crass and disheveled the tourists looked. There is hope however, most were not American's. In fact, the American's we saw were usually just loud and easily identifiable by their pleated Khaki's with sneaker look. In our opinion the worst offenders were typically Dutch, German, English, French and Russian (that is a whole blog post itself, they are like the world's cockroaches).
Food
The food scene in Bangkok was awesome. Unlike the states, most Thai take their meals in al fresco dining establishments set along side the road and continually nosh throughout the day on street food (unfortunately, sanitation is still a big gamble as evidenced by our dining companion in the photo below). Walking the street in Bangkok is a continual smell of delicious foods being cooks, grilled, roasted and fried. In the states, one of our favorite foods is Pad Thai, so we made a personal mission to try to find the best Pad Thai in Thailand. Since it only sells for about $1.5 on the street, every stand we passed we made it a point to sample their wares. Overall, we were feeling a bit downtrodden as nothing really surpassed the Pad Thai we could get at home, till our fortunes changed on our last night in Bangkok. The prior night, we decided to splurge a little and visit the top rated restaurant in Bangkok to enjoy some fantastic green & red curry (two dishes that have no equal at home) and luckily ran into our chef on his smoke break. He suggested we find a local night market, that set up shop on a side street after 6:00 pm and there, in his humble opinion, was the holy grail of Pad Thai. His palate was spot on, we found the fabled Pad Thai master on Soi 38 and had the best Pad Thai ever (we actually ordered a second round and took some home to eat).
Overall, our favorite Thai dishes ended up being mainstays of most Thai restaurants at home, however, in Thailand these dishes were elevated to all new levels. The produce was fresh, the fruit bought at street-side stalls was ripe, succulent and delicious and we experimented with new tastes like dragon fruit, red plums and jack fruit. The curries were sublime and always contained a subtle heat which the cold beer always took care of . Oddly enough some of the best meals we had were in shopping mall cafeteria's, unlike the states which mainly contain unhealthy fast food shops, the malls in Asia had huge food centers serving out amazing and relatively low priced Thai staples. BTW, yes those are deep fried grubs and crickets.
While in Bangkok, we had an opportunity to catch up with some fellow travelers from DC. Eden, a Georgetown SigEp, and his girlfriend, Mariclaire. We visited Cabbages & Condoms, an NGO whose profits help achieve their mission of providing condoms to poor, rural Thai communities. Below is "Condom Clause" and Tiger "Protect your" Woods.
Go Go Bars
No review of Bangkok would be complete with mentioning the abundance of destinations related to Sex Tourism. According to the guide books and people we spoke with, Thailand has always had a long standing open interpretation of sexuality and extremely forgiving of sexual vice. They are very open to gays and lesbians and many of the "lady-boys" or cross dressing Thai's, can be seen openly in the street. The big explosion of sexual tourism for Thailand happened during the Vietnam war, when GI's would frequent the capital on leave. After the war, an enterprising GI set down in Bangkok and started the now famous go-go bar, Cowboy. With this first establishment, go go bars exploded and prostitution was rampant in the city. The main areas for prostitution now are located in Soi Cowboy and Patpong - home to the famous ping-pong shows and enough neon lights and scantily clad women touting cheap drinks and good times to put Las Vegas to shame.
We saw tons of young Thai women with older white gentlemen throughout our time there and during our nights out you would see whole groups of western men frequenting the go-go bars. Originally our thoughts were of the poor women who are typically sold into this line of work, but we were amazed to find out a third of prostitutes were children and over 75% of John's are of Asian decent, the Westerns just stick out more and have more cash. One guide book stated it bluntly, Thai's typically don't brush trash under the carpet they just let it pile up, and once it is big enough they call it furniture.
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