Our story begins…in Bangkok

I have finally mustered up some energy to write my mammoth Thailand blog. My 16 day trip around Thailand was truly amazing, and I hope I can do justice to the time I spent there with my words and pictures.

After a short (compared to my trip back to the UK!) flight, Ellen and I arrived in sweaty, polluted, dirty, exciting, vibrant Bangkok! We were met at the airport by Ellen’s Thai friend, Rutt (who we would be staying with), and drove through the car-packed streets to her house. It was great to have a Thai family to stay with. A real little homestay. Rutt and her family were so kind and thoughtful the whole time we stayed with them ; driving us places ; taking us on a whirlwind tour of the Bangkok streets on our first night (apologies for nodding off a bit in the back of the car however!) ; encouraging us to try new foods ; providing us with many breakfasts and dinners cooked by their very own maid (very strange for us to get our heads round!) ; and generally being a very nice family to come home to at the end of a busy sightseeing day. Their house was in a nice street, which had its own night-watchman, and was not far from a big shopping mall, complete with Mr Donuts, Pizza Hut….and…wait for it….Tesco!!! yep, that’s right people, Tesco is the supermarket of choice in Thailand! Soooo cool! After wandering round the mall on one of our first days…guess what else we stumbled across….wait for it again…..Boots! God, I loved this country already! They had Botanics, Sanctuary stuff….everything! I know I know it’s really sad to get excited about such stupid things as shops from home, but I feel like I’m allowed…as I don’t actually live at ‘home’ at the moment.

My first impressions of Thailand were all very positive. After the initial couple of hours of feeling knackered, overwhelmed and hot, I quickly began to realise what an exciting country I had just arrived in. The streets were so full of life ; tuk tuks zipping around, motorbikes darting in and out, people buying and eating from the stalls, the sounds of people selling, laughing, shouting, living. Granted they were also very scary, as just walking to the local mall was a dangerous obstacle course of fast vehicles, food carts, and icky stuff on the ground. But it was fun…fun to be in all that excitement and chaos…and by the end of our trip, we had started to understand that if you wanted to cross a road, or get somewhere, you just simply had to go for it and throw caution to the wind a little bit!!

Our first full day in Bangkok (Saturday) was spent at the amazing weekend market. Seriously, this is the market to end all markets. You could buy anything and everything at this place. It took me the first hour to warm up, as I was simply so overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I could potentially buy (I was in bracelet heaven!), but I soon got into the swing of things. I got back into the bartering (although I’m sure I was sooo much better at it in Pakistan, aged 15…maybe I had no conscience then!), and got a few little bargains. We wandered around the stalls selling, scarves, buddhas, jewels, fake label bags and sunglasses, pieces of art, silk, incense, furniture, food, slogan t-shirts, animals and fish (the pet section!...which even featured some Siamese fighting fish), and tried to avert our eyes from the beggars on the ground, and the poor conditions that the animals were kept in. It was a real sensory experience…so much to see and smell (not always great!) and touch etc etc. At the market we enjoyed a lovely spicy lunch of different Thai dishes (the spicy minced pork was divine), and I sampled a couple of different fresh juices, which were to be the first of soooooo many! That evening I think we went to see some amazing Christmas lights in central Bangkok (god, my memory’s bad!). It was Christmas Eve after all, and we were happy to enter into the Bangkok Christmas spirit.