LIFE EVENTS – SEA2023 Part 8 – Exploring Bangkok today!

After waking up in Bangkok, we headed out to get breakfast before embarking on our first day exploring Bangkok. Our initial plan was to head to the nearby mall which we got dinner at previously but after learning that it wasn’t opening for three more hours, we decided to use Grab to find our way to a nearby restaurant. 

We ate some more Asian food while we were there before deciding to head back to the hotel to get ready for the day. We decided to start by traveling to the Grand Palace of Bangkok, which is where the royal family lives. Little note about Thailand: DON’T TRASH TALK THEIR ROYAL FAMILY.  THEY WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE HELL. There’s crazy stories of people all over the internet who say some mild insults against the royal family, then they go to Thailand and get nasty surprises for things they did 3 years ago. It’s wild how seriously they take it— comparable to North Korea (maybe). 

Anyway, we initially had plans to check out the palace with Adan and his family. Unfortunately, they had gotten up and started doing their own thing before we had and were already occupied when we arrived. We decided to wait for Adan’s family to come and walked around the area of Bangkok just next to the palace. We stopped at a cafe nearby to get some drinks while we waited. I got a blueberry flavored drink which I sipped as I watched the action take place on the busy streets nearby. It was nice to have a drink that would cool my body down, especially in the heat of the tropics that I still wasn’t used to yet. Seriously, how can millions of people live here? It’s wild.

View of the palace from just outside

Finally, we received word that Adan was arriving and so we started getting ready to cross the street to the walls of the palace nearby. We walked down the street to the other side and headed to the entrance which was unsurprisingly well guarded by security. Their numbers were pretty high— and they were all armed with rifles and had intimidating outfits on. Probably not best to pester them, then. 

We lined up at the entrance which surprisingly did not take very long– I’m honestly astonished by the fact that not a single line I entered during the trip took several hours to get through. We reached the entrance and were pulled aside by one of the people in charge of security at the front.

No, we weren’t in trouble. No, nobody criticized the Thai King. Apparently they just wanted us to wear some special Thai clothes. I don’t think there was any rule that required us to wear them (As I don’t recall many people in the palace wearing it). This could have just been some opportunity to generate profit out of a clueless tourist family or something, I have no idea. It didn’t matter, though, because we bought the clothes and went into the changing room to put them on. They were essentially these long pants that were really soft and comfortable to walk around and sit in. They were almost like the clothes I had back at home in the States, although there was a notable difference that these pants that loads of art on them. There wasn’t a single square inch that was dotted to the brim with patterns. To an outsider who had never seen one of these, the patterns could be quite mesmerizing. 

With our advertisement out of the way, it was now time to explore the palace itself. By this point, it was already noon and we were getting both hungry and tired. The sun was draining our energy, but we moved forward and entered the palace.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the thing itself isn’t really a palace. Well, yes, there is a huge palace that the royal family lives in on par with the white house, but it’s not just a single building. Just like how the White house has a building on its side (The one with the Oval Office or something?), the palace is surrounded by hundreds of these smaller but significant buildings which on their own could be a tourist attraction. These buildings were dotted with these shiny substances (Reminds me of gold, honestly) and we walked around the outside of the building, surveying the complex patterns formed by the arrangement of the colorful materials that composed the walls. The very back of one of these buildings also features a door which you can actually enter and revealed some very interesting artwork inside. It’s totally worthy of a photo in my books, but photography wasn’t allowed in that building for some reason… just buy a ticket to Bangkok and see for yourself. Or something.

We went back to the front of one of the side gold building things and by that point everyone was exhausted. For some reason, it had taken an hour for us to walk from one end of the building to the other and we hadn’t even gotten to the point where we could see the real palace where the Royal Family lives. We hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so we were all starving. Adan had completely collapsed and was just sitting down on the ground on his phone. Casey was also starting to lose his mind and he stole my phone to take pictures of himself making faces. I’m not questioning that, although I still do  have it for leverage just in case I need it later on.

One of the gold buildings on the side

 

The elaborate paintings on the walls of the golden buildings

As we left, we finally passed by the world-recognized palace of the Thai King. That thing was huge— I mean, a lot of the things we’ve seen this past week of traveling are huge, but this palace was no exception. On the top was a podium where they could really make a lot of speeches— below was a grand entrance with a massive staircase— it would take a long time to reach the top. I would have loved to sit  around and just take pictures, because the whole area was interesting— we could see the Thai version of the White House. Unlike the White House, however, you could get within close range. The White House is very closely protected by guards in America (I know this because I’ve been there, although I forgot too much to write a story about it now) and they make you look at it from so far away that you can’t really appreciate its size. The Thai Royal Palace comes up very close and it’s a lot easier to fathom how big that thing is in person.

But we had to go now, and we now took another Grab Taxi to head to our next destination. This place is called Terminal 21. Does it sound like an airport to you, too? No, it’s not. But it was made to mimic an airport in certain ways. Terminal 21 is basically a huge mall (Which Bangkok is well known for having many of those) with loads of floors. 

Terminal 21  has this unique system where each floor has a certain “patron city” that it represents, with all the decorations and shops having some connection or being related to that city. It’s been over 9 months since I’ve been there as I’m writing this, so upon research there was a San Francisco floor (Which I remember seeing. There’s this huge chandelier thing of the golden gate bridge inside). Google also says that there is a Caribbean Floor (Which I vaguely remember), a Parisian floor (Which I remember), a Tokyo Floor (Which I don’t remember), and a London Floor (Which I don’t remember if I remember). It didn’t take me very long to figure out this theme pattern while I was exploring the mall and I went wild when I saw the signs of the floor themes on the escalator. I almost forgot about my hunger and began riding up all the escalators, trying to guess what the theme for the next floor would be. After my parents were finally able to get me and Casey to calm down, we met up with Adan on the San Francisco themed floor and began exploring for a place to eat. We quickly discovered that Terminal 21 only accepted payment on these little cards specialized for the mall, so we went to exchange some money. Casey and I each got a card of about 500 bhat that we could spend and we basically ate on a budget (About 20 bucks, which is usually enough in Southeast Asia). It reminded me of Drew Binsky’s own budget challenge series on YouTube, which I used to watch (and still watch) quite often. I realized somewhat quickly that the whole budget was actually going to be fairly strict and that the challenge might not be so easy after all, despite Southeast Asia being a generally cheap place.

The first place we ate at was a sushi restaurant where they gave you a conveyer and you got to pick and choose the sushi that they served you. They colored the plates which colors that indicated the price, which ranged from just 30 bhat up to 90 bhat. I wanted to eat a diverse meal so I decided to be reserved— I only spent a couple hundred bhat on the restaurant, carefully and strategically choosing what I’d eat. Casey went ahead and basically had his entire lunch in that one restaurant, blowing pretty much the whole card on it. He had a whole tower of plates he filled up pretty quick, and some of it was expensive stuff. He actually went beyond the 500 bhat limit. Adan also ended up eating quite a lot, while my parents ate to a so and so extent. At the end of the meal, we discovered that this sushi restaurant didn’t actually require you to pay with the special card, so Casey didn’t blow his whole budget on the thing. He was full, however, and he ended up sitting down at a table while I went to go find more food. 

I ended up giving up on the whole “strategic eating” idea and just went ahead and grabbed Hainanese rice and chicken, which I inhaled because I was so hungry. My parents ate a little bit too. By this point, Adan and his family had already left. It was late afternoon by the time we were heading back to the bottom of the mall, and we decided to go back to our hotel at around 4:00. When we reached the bottom, everyone was surprised to suddenly discover Adan’s friend Nathan again at the front of Terminal 21, who we swiftly greeted before pulling up a taxi on Grab, who began making his way out to us. We walked down the street to a place where it would be easier to pull up and waited about 15 minutes for the Grab Taxi to arrive. The taxi was just a few minutes away when… it canceled out on us. Yep, they bailed out. Slightly annoyed by this, we all called on another taxi to pick us up who also ended up bailing out. And to make things even worse, my phone battery died out. This was really bad because my phone was the only phone that had any internet connection at all and since we were all dependent on it, we were essentially left stranded at Terminal 21. 

We went ahead and looked for a taxi and after 30 minutes of walking back and forth, we found one. We ended up deciding to take him and started the 2 mile journey back to the hotel… which took 40 minutes. Yeah, I could walk in a shorter time, although it’d be a little more painful. We ended up  just waiting there, almost not moving because of how bad the traffic was. The first mile in particular was very painful. We just sat there, moving three feet a minute and praying that the traffic would clear out soon. I could run at twice the speed that car was going. Hell, I could swim faster (I think). We ended up talking to the driver to entertain ourselves as we didn’t have our phones to stare at. When the traffic started building up, he asked us for more money. After coming to a compromise, the traffic suddenly started clearing out and we started moving again. The first half of the journey had taken an hour, but the last mile went by super quickly— cars were moving fast and there was no traffic problem. I’m not sure why the traffic issues dissipated so quickly, but good thing it did because we were finally able to arrive back at our hotel. We ended up paying the driver 500 bhat for his efforts in the end. Finally, we had arrived back from lunch. The time was already 7:00, which was essentially dinner time. No one was really hungry, however, to get dinner, so we ended up going into the hotel. We went into the lobby and originally planned to head to the elevator. 

We were interrupted, however, by giggling and laughing noises actively coming from the pool nearby. I looked over there, and in the relatively dim light of the room I see Nathan, Adan, and the other kids all splashing around in the pool. I usually have huge FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and don’t like to be excluded, and now was no exception, but for some reason whenever the party already starts like this I want to cancel out completely.

And that’s what I did. I pretty much spent the rest of the night staring at my laptop. Casey put on his swim stuff and went in the pool, playing around with them. 

With that, the day pretty much came to an end. We just chilled out for the rest of the night, getting ready for the excursions of the next day. We have a lot to discuss then, including some wild “Casey Stories”…

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