Ari, Ari, Ari - Oi, Oi, Oi!

Today we have decided to visit another location, and even though our last trip out to a specific area (On Nut) was a tad disappointing, we are not put off from seeing the place for ourselves and making our own minds up.

A&A are heading out to do some shopping at CentralWorld, Big C and Platinum Fashion Mall, and we are off to explore the Ari location.

Ari is a soi (alley) and residential neighbourhood in Bangkok, Thailand. It is a trendy area popular among younger generations, especially teenagers and young adults. The area is lined with stylish cafes and bakeries, modern restaurants, and a leading community-style mall. Ari has been featured by several media outlets as one of the best neighbourhoods to travel to in Bangkok, and in The New York Times as one of the 47 best in the world. At the entrance of Soi Ari is the Ari BTS station (N5), located above Phahonyothin Road. The station provides convenient access to the neighbourhood via the Sukhumvit BTS line.

We make our first probable mistake as soon as we are off the train at Ari – we take the worst exit possible. Because we don’t really know what we are looking for or what we are going to find, we just start walking. We do walk past some interesting-looking buildings, which I think are government office buildings.

Now I’m not sure if this is some omen or not, but we quickly came across The Death Awareness Café. We had a bit of a surprise and chuckle at this, though when I came to writing up this post, I found a BBC article about someone’s experience of going to this. It was quite an interesting article as it is an actual experience covering the four main stages of life: birth, ageing, illness and finally death. I guess it does sound quite macabre to ‘westerners’ that don’t like to think about this much, but it is very much in line with the Buddhist teachings and beliefs. We didn’t go into the place because we thought it was just an escape room-themed establishment, as we could see that several Escape Room experiences were on offer from outside.

We walked on until we came to the next BTS station (Sanam Pao) and agreed that there was not much to see here, so we then turned back and started to walk back towards the Ari BTS station area. We soon discovered that there was a lot more to see in this area if we had just taken the opposite direction.

The area is littered with cute cafes, street vendors, restaurants and shops. We could see that there was a small mall across on the other side of the street, and had decided to explore one side before crossing over the bridge walkway and then doing the other side. We walked all around the area, and we really enjoyed it. There were a lot of lovely leafy streets with nice condos, fancy cars and the vibe was really cool. The weather was unfortunately very hot. After a bit of walking in the heat, we stumbled upon a little café that we had seen in a Ted Aroi (YouTuber) video called Kura Café and went in there for a little rest and a cool down. The girls serving us were so sweet and friendly, and because we had spent over 100 baht, we could pick a golden egg from a bucket. I picked the egg, and we won a free drinks voucher. As we were leaving, we told them that we visited because of the Ted Aroi video and showed it to them – they had no idea, and they were so happy to watch it. Definitely go here if you are in the area.

After a break, we continued on and then traversed to the other side of the road, where there was a mall, some office block shop areas and more street vendors. It was around lunchtime, so the place was extremely busy with the lunch crowds. We bought some Thai food items from some sellers to try later, and because it was so warm and busy, we decided to just have a burger for lunch in an air-conditioned McDonalds.

After lunch, we did some more walking around, and once we felt we had covered the area, we hopped back on the BTS and headed home. As usual, we picked up some groceries and something for our evening meal before we got back to the apartment. Then it was shower, rest and relax. An exhausted A&A returned shortly after us, but they had a good day of shopping and seeing what they want to get.

Some YouTube videos of the area:

Day 22: 16 December 2025

Bangkok, Thailand