Allie and I really didn’t have too much of a desire to stay in Bangkok, it was more a stopover so that we could figure out my scuba diving classes and a break from a long bus trip from Umphang. 36 hours in Bangkok was enough for us! We did enjoy taking advantage of the many non-Thai food options that the big city had to offer though. If you are not a big city person, this is a good guide for an easy way to take in a little Bangkok culture without going crazy trying to get around or see too much!
After relaxing our first day and not doing a whole lot more than eating, we hit a few happy hours, including my favorite, a salsa bar happy hour at Sunrise Taco’s. It really wasn’t that great, and I would imagine their Mexican food is crap, but after eating nothing but Thai food for three weeks, an all-you-can-eat salsa bar hit the spot, no matter how low the quality.
A couple of drinks later, we headed back to our hostel for a relatively early night, still tired from getting in at 4 a.m. To our surprise, the road back to our hostel turned into a red light district with loud club music and strippers lining the street, and with them lots of foreign men with guilty smiles. If you are into Thai women doing strange things with strange parts of their body, Bangkok is for you. I only know this from flyers that men in jumpsuits were handing us all over the street, despite Allie eventually beginning to yell at them to “GO AWAY!”
The next morning we grabbed breakfast at 7/11 and then headed to go do the one thing we actually wanted to do in Bangkok: the weekend market. The Bangkok weekend market is a huge, hectic claustrophobic lot of stall after stall of anything and everything that you could ever want, from Black Sabbath t-shirts to puppies! Oh, and this is definitely the place to go for all of your Thai souvenirs.
So once we had sufficiently loaded up on gifts to bring home, we bought bus/ferry tickets to Koh Tao and got the hell out of Bangkok to begin the last leg of our Thailand trip to island paradise.
2 responses to “36 hours in Bangkok, Thailand”
Nice little distraction during the work day to visit Bankok in my mind's eye thanks to your great post. Now I can scratch Bangkok off my bucket list.
One point of clarification. Were the market puppies for sale as pets or taco buffet?
Is Bankok Mexican food similar to the Mexican food you find in our area, meaning the Mexican food we eat is crap, or are you comparing it to what you just had in South America? I'd like to think Bankok's Mexican food is worse than what we have in the States!