Long Travel Day
Whew, that was a long and exhausting travel day. These long travel days feel longer and longer as I get older. My bad knee was all stiff by the time we touched down at Bangkok (snowboarding incident when I was young and dumb) and I only got about 3 hours of sleep. This time, it took us almost 30 hours to get from door to door. That’s nuts.
Our travel day didn’t start off well because we had to come back home twice! The first time was when I noticed that I left RB40Jr’s birth certificate behind. We needed that to complete his Thai citizenship process and it was the main reason we’re coming to Thailand this time. I should have double checked the previous night. That was careless of me. The second thing I noticed was that Jr had 2 left shoes on. Yikes, that wouldn’t work for this trip. Anyway, we finally got it together and took the streetcar and light rail to the airport. Luckily, we planned to leave 3 hours before our flight time so the extra delay didn’t make a big difference.
The flights and layovers were mostly on schedule. Our first layover was at LAX. We landed in terminal 6 and found the underground walkway to the international terminal. That was awesome because we didn’t have to exit and go through airport security again. I had to do that the last time I flew out of LAX years ago. This time we went straight to the departure gate and got our boarding passes there. The next flight was from LAX to Taipei and the longest flight on this leg of our journey. The departure from LAX left about a hour late and we were a bit worried about our connecting flight to Bangkok as we had only a half hour between flights. It turned out fine, though. There were quite a few people heading to Bangkok and the plane waited for us.
We landed in Bangkok and got through immigration very quickly. There was no line at the Thai residents line. That was great! Customs was a breeze, too, since we only had carry-ons and nothing to declare. After that, we grabbed a taxi and arrived at our hotel in about half an hour.
All in all, it was a mostly trouble free travel day. RB40Jr stayed up most of the trip and played with the entertainment system. He watched a bunch of movies and played video games. That was great because it helped a ton with the jet lag. When we got to the hotel, we just went to sleep and got up in the morning. I’m not sure if it will be this easy to adjust to jet lag when we go back to the US.
Sleeping on the long flight
RB40Jr finally got worn out and took a 5 hour nap on the long flight from LAX to Taipei. We were pretty lucky and got one of the “family couch” seats on this flight. China Airlines’ Boeing 777 had 10 rows of seats in this configuration. You can pop the footrests up and turn 3 seats into a small “family couch.”
This is pretty awesome for Junior and he had a great nap. However, the adults were a bit too big for this configuration to work well. It would have been a great fit if there were just one adult and one kid. We had 3 people and the space was just too small. In the end, we folded 2 seats up and left one in the normal position and took turns lying down. Lying down wasn’t that comfortable either because we had to keep our legs folded. Oh well, at least our kid was comfortable.
Day 1 – Silom
We took it easy on our first day in Bangkok and mostly hung out near our hotel, the Dusit Thani. My cousin works for Dusit International and got us an awesome rate – about $100 for 3 nights. The Silom area is very busy because it is the main financial district in Bangkok. The small sidewalks are always super crowded and I didn’t like it. We’re used to more space in Portland. Here, people were rushing everywhere and we couldn’t take our time to look around. We’d be blocking foot traffic if we walk too slowly. It was fine for a few days, though.
Food Culture
In the morning, we took a short walk to explore the area around our hotel. Wow, there were so many places to eat here. There must be more eateries in this Silom area than the entire Portland metro. We saw a ton of street vendors, food stalls, local restaurants, take out places, and restaurant chains in the mall. The locals eat out all the time because there is food for every budget. You can get a meal for about a buck or spend $50 on a fancy dinner. The food culture is what I like most about Bangkok.
Here were some of the things we picked up on our first look around Silom.
Left to right (exchange rate is about 35 baht for 1 dollar)
Shumai – I don’t know why, but shumais are so much better here in Thailand than in the US. I think they use more shrimp. This cost 40 baht.
Sticky rice dipped in egg and roasted over charcoal. 10 baht.
Super spicy Nam Phrik, chilli dip. 20 baht.
Lemongrass drink. 20 baht.
Kanom krok – Thai coconut pudding. I loved these when I was a kid. 25 baht.
Snake Farm
The next thing on our list was to meet up with my uncle and cousin at the Snake Farm nearby. This Snake Farm is part of the Thai Red Cross and their mission is to educate the public about snakes. Mrs. RB40 came here about 30 years ago, but I’ve never visited. She said it is a lot nicer now. We paid 90 baht for the entrance fee. Everything in Thailand has 2 prices. The foreigner price would be 500 baht. I think that’s fair considering the minimum wage here is 300 baht per day. What do you think about this two-price tier?
We saw the venom milking demonstration at 11 am and it was fascinating to see real spitting cobras in action. They milked 6 cobras and a couple of them were very aggressive. I’d be scared stiff if I saw one of these out in the wild. Junior really enjoyed the show and seeing a bunch of different snakes in the exhibition hall. Afterward, we had lunch at the cafeteria nearby. The local food was pretty good and we all enjoyed it. My uncle paid for this meal so I’m not sure how much it was, probably around $15 for 5 of us.
Relaxing at the pool
After lunch, we went back to the hotel and took a short break. RB40Jr wanted to go swimming so we checked out the salt water pool. This is the first time we tried a salt water pool and I like it. It is just a little salty, not like the ocean water. Is the salt to help with buoyancy?
After a nice swim, we went back out to explore Silom more. We left the hotel around 5 pm and it was an interesting time. The office workers were just getting out so the streets were packed. Many small restaurants and food stalls were closing up after they’ve been open since early morning and many stalls were getting set up for the night. It was a shift change for the street vendors. I thought it was interesting to see how they maximize the space.
We stopped by Hai Somtum Convent for dinner. Somtum is a popular spicy salad from the northeast part of Thailand. The food was good, but it didn’t blow us away. The somtum wasn’t too spicy and we ate it without too much trouble.
Esan sausage, Gai Yang (grilled chicken), Somtum, and sticky rice. This meal cost 370 baht or around $12.
Day 2 – Nonthaburi Excursion
We headed to Nonthaburi on day 2 to add RB40Jr to the house registration. My aunt owns a house in Nonthaburi and my immediate family is registered here. You need to be registered in order to get a Thai ID, vote, buy property, and many other things.
It took us about 90 minutes from Silom to the government office in Nonthaburi. We took the subway, shuttle bus, and a light rail to get there. On the way back, we took a boat from Nonthaburi to Bangkok and a skytrain to get back to the hotel. We could have taken a taxi, but my aunt though it would be fun to see the public transportation options in Bangkok.
The registration process itself went off without a hitch. It took us about 90 minutes to finish everything. I’m very grateful for my aunt for her help. RB40Jr will have the option to live, work, and retire in Thailand in the future. More options are always better.
Afterward, we went to visit another uncle and went out to lunch at Suanthip, a traditional royal Thai style restaurant. (My mom has 8 siblings so I have a lot of aunts and uncles here.) The palace cuisine is a bit different than the typical spicy Thai food because they strive for balance. There shouldn’t be extreme flavors in any dishes. One thing I heard as a child was that poor people eat hot and spicy food. Rich people prefer less spicy. This is probably because the really spicy food is from the northeastern region of Thailand where people were poorer in the past. I’m not sure if this is just a myth or what, but I like spicy food. Anyway, this was my first royal Thai food experience and we really enjoyed it. Check out some of what we had.
Rice cake with dipping sauce – The rice cakes were much better than the packaged Styrofoam like rice cakes we have in the US. These were actually good and I’d eat them as a snack.
Lotus petals Miang Kham – I’ve never had this dish with lotus petals before. Usually, you use cha phlu leaves.
Wrap it up and eat it, yummm!
Banana flower salad – just a little spicy.
Vegetables with Nam Phrik – this was a sweet type of chili paste, not very spicy at all.
We had a few more ordinary looking dishes and they were all very good. This meal cost 2,100 baht ($60) for 7 people and my aunt picked up the tab. That’s how it is here in Asia. The older relatives won’t let you pay for anything.
Dinner
RB40Jr woke up at 4:30 am this day and everyone was amazed that he was still up at 5 pm. We went swimming and went to have dinner at Silom Complex near the hotel. It was dinner time so we had a hard time finding a place to eat. I wanted to try Bonchon chicken (Korean style wings), but they had a big wait. So we tried Omu instead.
I had a pork katsu with miso sauce and Mrs. RB40 had mushroom cream sauce.
This is a yoshaku restaurant, a western influenced style of Japanese cuisine. There are a ton of Asian dishes that we’ve never seen before and it’d take us a year to try everything. We went for this one because we couldn’t wait in line and it looked like something Jr would eat. This meal cost 500 bath, about $14.
After dinner, we grabbed a couple of desserts to take back to the hotel from the food mall. There are food stalls like this in the basement of every shopping mall. Office workers buy food to eat at home so they don’t have to cook. This is fast food in Thailand.
Day 3 – exploring around Hua Lumphong
I’m writing this in the early hours of day 3. We’re going to check out of the hotel later this morning and head to the Hua Lumphong train station. Our overnight train isn’t leaving until 6 pm so we’re planning to check our luggage at the station. We plan to visit Wat Traitmit to see the biggest gold Buddha statue in the world, that’s 5.5 tons of gold! The Buddha statue was cast around the 13th century and it was hidden for almost 200 years. The statue was plastered over to hide it from the Burmese and everyone forgot about it. In 1954, the statue was being moved to another location, the ropes broke, and the statue fell to the ground. Some of the plaster broke off and part of the gold Buddha was revealed. Wow, that’s a great story.
Next time, I’ll write about our overnight train trip to Chiang Mai. We got extremely lucky and got a berth on the inaugural trip of the new train! I’m so looking forward to it. Stay tuned!
RB40Jr’s quote – “Thailand is like Tatooine!”
Exploring Bangkok 2016 is a post from: Copyright © 2010-2016 Retire By 40 All Rights Reserved
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