Finding our feet in Bangkok...

Ok, onto our first day of waking up in Bangkok.

OMG I was boiling when I woke up at something like 4 am (probably due to my decent sleep on the plane), but I'm a considerate person, so I was conscious of trying not to wake his nibs up as he was completely out for the count. I thought switching on the small bedroom air fan (which is less noisy than the air conditioning) might help to cool me down enough, so that I could sleep some more. It didn't. So instead I got up, and spent time in the living room (with the air conditioning on) until R surfaced.

However, it was beautiful watching the sunrise emerging from the apartment windows and hearing Bangkok slowly waking up.

After getting showered and ready, having a quick yoghurt for breakfast, we left the apartment at about 7.00 am and headed out to explore. The sound of the little birds in the area is just so lovely....

We decided to walk from our apartment to the Terminal 21 shopping mall at Asok, which was about a 50-minute walk from our apartment. The Thong Lo BTS to Asok is about 13mins (or 36mins walking). Oh my goodness, the heat even at that time in the morning, was quite different to what we are used to but off we went.

We passed lots of street seller stands selling various foods, especially to the morning commuters heading to work. Now, one of the things that we didn't know about at this stage was that the shopping malls don't open until 10 am. So we did learn that lesson the hard way when I suggested we stop off in the EmSphere shopping mall, which was on our way to Terminal 21 (because it looked like it had an Ikea in there too, which I thought would be nice and cool!). When I say the 'hard way' - I mean the extra sweat and energy involved (not to mention the risk to life with the traffic!) in the diversion to cross the very busy roads in the building heat - so yeah I got a bit of grief about that 'great idea of mine'!

We stopped off at a few places like grocery stores as we were walking, especially where we could get some respite from the heat from their indoor air conditioning on offer.

We then opted for some breakfast at the Interchange 21 food court.

This appears to be a Japanese / Thai food court, which is in the basement area of the building. It had a huge variety of foods available and lots of customers. It's quite basic (but was very busy) with all the various food vendors, and has a seating area if eating inside. I opted for a chicken and rice dish (and even added some Thai condiments to it - oh, aren't I getting spicy brave!) and R went for a chicken General Tso with rice. Both were delicious, and the total cost with drinks was about £3.50!

Then it was off to Terminal 21 for a visit, which is quite something else, with each of the floors represented by key landmarks of different major cities around the world. This also had probably one of the biggest, longest and steepest escalators that I have ever seen or gone on. Poor R was a little traumatised by vertigo (he's not good with heights in general), so he could not look down or go anywhere near the glass railings on the upper floors, and he got nervous when I did..... He also informed me that a tourist had sadly died after falling from the 4th level in Terminal 21 just a few days ago and that he wasn't the first person to die in this manner in this location, which is quite unsettling and sad.

Then we decided that was enough for the day and made our way over to the Asok BTS for the skytrain back to Thong Lo.

Later in the evening, after we'd rested, showered and changed again - we headed out to explore some more of our local neighbourhood and get some dinner.

This time, we opted for the Tasty Congee & Noodle Wantun restaurant in Thonglor, which is Michelin-rated. My noodle and beef dish was very good, but R's noodle and pork choice was nothing to write home about (although I am indeed writing home about it!). The bill with drinks was about £25. We did note that the bill had a 10% service charge and a 7% VAT charge on it, whereas the place we ate in the previous night only had a 3% service charge. Strange!

All in all, our first full day in Bangkok was full on with almost 23,000 steps recorded on my phone app (so I probably did a bit more as I don't carry my phone with me all day and everywhere!). I hope my brother is taking note...