(sorry for no title pic, I forgot to take pics that day)
Our last day in Bangkok (Don’t get any funny ideas) started with us waking up and again struggling to get breakfast. The big mall next to our hotel was closed again (It usually doesn’t open until later on in the morning) so we ended up having to bail out and just bought some packaged food at the nearby convenience store. After we had breakfast, we decided that our next attraction would be: A mall. Yeah, surprising, I know. We planned to meet our old friend Adan there again— I believe the mall is called the Siam center, and it’s another boring but short car drive away. This one is again only a few miles away but it might as well have been an hour due to the time it took to get there.
Our last day in Bangkok ends, and the second phase of the trip is about to come to a close. We start with a quick breakfast before heading straight to the mall, where we eventually arrived around 10 in the morning. After exploring around the mall for a bit, we met up with Adan and a taller boy named Charleton and it was agreed that us kids could roam freely around the mall and meet with our parents later on.
No one was hungry for lunch just yet, so we decided to just cruise around the mall and see what we could find. I’m not really a mall person but I did join in. We started in a shoe store which sold a bunch of these extravagant shoes. Then we explored all these different sections of the mall, selling all these different products. When we got hungry, we decided to eat at this huge market in an underground floor of the building. This market quickly ended up becoming one of the wildest things I had ever seen before. For an underground facility, it had literally everything. There were active stalls filled selling every possible food type and product- there were enough things to keep me occupied for weeks.
After some elaboration, I decided to just get some kebabs that I found in a nearby stall. Charleton and Adan bought some lunch for themselves while Casey decided to get… wait, no, that can’t be right… he decided to blow all his money on some kind of expensive ice cream in one of the stalls. Since the kebabs I got were cheap, I bought some ice cream as well and sat down to eat my stuff. Casey didn’t have any money to buy some real lunch, so he decided to steal mine. I chased him around the underground market for about five minutes before deciding to stop when I realized I was being watched. Casey continued to taunt me with the money to the entertainment of literally everyone on the scene until I sort of just gave up and let him keep the money, although I was able to steal it back later on.
With lunch now taken care of, the guys and I decided to continue exploring the vast mall. It seemed as if we’d only seen a small part of it. I was intent on joining in the exploration but Casey wasn’t done being a clown just yet. He headed to the nearest escalator, went halfway up the flight… and started walking down. Yeah, and he was just standing there walking down on an escalator that goes up for ten minutes. Me, Charlatan, and Adan all moved to another floor and watched from the distance as Casey walked down the upwards escalator, passing by several confused locals as he did. Eventually he stopped and started roaming carelessly around the mall. The guys and I went to track him down, but he had already gone out of sight.
“Just let him go,” We decided. “He’ll come back to us.” He’d already strayed off the past several times in the past couple hours, and half of our conversations were derived off just that. We decided to sit down on a few chairs we found at the center of the mall and then… Casey appeared.
I ran after him and chased him down the hallway until we reached an elevator. He entered one of them and escaped to another floor. I didn’t arrive soon enough to see him enter the elevator, so I didn’t know which elevator he went into. I ran back to tell Adan and Charleton, who were unusually chilled out about the whole thing.
“He went into one of the elevators and I don’t know which one he went into,” I explained.
“It’s fine, he’ll find his way back to us somehow,” They insisted.
I went off to the floor immediately above us to see if I could find Casey. I searched for about twenty minutes and couldn’t find him, so I walked back downstairs to the chairs to find Casey was already there.
Now everyone was eager to explore the top floor of the mall which offered great views of the Bangkok City. It turned out the top floor was even more amazing than that of the underground market. This top floor also consisted of several restaurants and cafes, one of which sold Casey his first ever drink of coffee. There were several balconies which provided amazing views of the city. You could see buildings from a hundred miles away. Inside, there was a massive room with a skylight and an elaborate system of escalators which took you to massive fountains and indoor gardens.
We chilled here for about a half hour until we ran into Adan’s parents, who were also visiting the area. Adan and Charleton were picked up and all of them left, meaning Casey and I were on our own. Casey bought some coffee while I sat down and we waited for our parents to pick us up at the top. Eventually they did. Casey and I were eager to get home and do who knows what, but our parents weren’t exactly ready yet. We all traveled back to the underground market where Casey and I sort of just awkwardly sat and waited for our parents to finish their own lunches while we sat and awkwardly met up with Nathan and his family.
And when we finally finished lunch, we headed straight to the hotel using the seven hundredth Grab of the trip. And we sat down for another forty minutes, waiting for us to travel about… four or five miles to get back to the hotel. I sat down and looked at the scenery for about forty minutes when for some reason, my mom and dad told us to get out of the car when we still had roughly 3 miles left to travel. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but I was later told the driver had been “accidentally” making wrong turns for when we got back to the hotel. My parents were able to pick it up because they had used my phone to track down the route and knew that the driver was messing things up. The driver had also gotten into a heated encounter with another driver on the road which caused a loud and aggressive argument which made everyone very uncomfortable. My dad even claims to have seen our driver pull out a knife on the street which made everyone leave.
The walk back to the hotel took another hour and we had to slowly walk through pretty much the entire city in order to reach the hotel. Finally, we made it back and this time I decided to head into the pool and hang out for a bit. Nathan had also made it back to the hotel some time previously, and we met him there and started wrestling around in the water with him for about 30 minutes playing Marco Polo until Nathan eventually got tired and we all left.
The remainder of the day was spent eating Grab Food and relaxing. With this, the Thailand Phase of the trip was coming to an end. But we aren’t done with the trip yet- we’re still just getting started. The next phase of our trip will be spent with Mia and Koia, and I’m going to have a hell of a lot of fun writing about this for the next few months. This is where Vietnamese Travel really starts…
Cody Nguyen