The Ratchaprasong District

Bangkok, Day 15

Today's plan was to visit the Ratchaprasong area of Bangkok to see the various malls and shops.

BTS Skywalkway

Thankfully the BTS skywalkway in this area is brilliant, so you can easily transverse from one area to another whilst under some cover and without the need to go down onto the street - you are also able to get good views and your bearings which is a bonus. We took the BTS from Thong Lo to Chit Lom.

Gaysorn Village

The first building that we feasted our eyes on from the Skywalkway was the external frontage of the Gaysorn Amarin Shopping mall.

The Gaysorn Village comprises three buildings: the Gaysorn Amarin Shopping Mall, the Gaysorn Centre and the Gaysorn Tower.

The Gaysorn Amarin Shopping mall (formerly the Amarin Plaza) is a mixed use commercial development in the Ratchaprasong area, consisting of 5-storey shopping mall and 22-storey office building.

This is a drop-dead gorgeous building which just oozes glamour and sophistication (and yes, we did feel a little out of our depth in here), but it was absolutely stunning to view. The design and architecture are just amazing. As for the shops, there are several high-end shops like Louis Vuitton, but then there is also an amazing and very affordable food court, which of course we wanted to make use of, but we would have to have bought yet another food card.

Now this leads me onto the food court cards which don't get me wrong are great - you simply go to the cash card desk ask to put X amount of Bhat onto a card and then you can usually use the card in all the food stalls, so the stalls don't need to deal with cash or cards, you just scan your food card and it takes off the amount owed. I say usually as there always seems to be a few places that don't take the card. However, we seem to now have a collection of these cards that we are carrying about. So handy if we use them, otherwise we will end up with money on the cards that either don't get used, expire, or we won't get around to cashing in. So good, but you need to try and be careful on how likely you are to use them and how we weren't sure if we would be back here again, made use of....

Yes, that is a giraffe...

Central World

Our next key stop was the CentralWorld shopping mall. This was absolutely massive and R in particular found both this quite unnerving as the escalators are long and open and you can also see quite far down the building (well, R didn't really as he avoided being too close to the atrium side of the escalators). Architecturally, these malls look amazing, but I can see why a lot of people don't like them - I'm not bad with heights, but they were a little scary, and I'd love to see the risk assessment and accident stats for these places!

Lunch

As usual we took advantage of the wonderful food mall and had a delicious meal in the CentralWorld food court. Mine was a special fried rice, with a soup and a salted egg yolk dessert which was very yummy. R had a chicken and rice dish. Total costs with drinks was just over 220 baht (about £5.00).

After refuelling, we walked around the building some more and then decided to start making our way back home.

Erawan Shrine

On our way to CentralWorld and back again, we passed the Erawan Shrine. This was built in 1956 as part of the government-owned Erawan Hotel to eliminate the bad karma believed to be caused by laying the foundations on the wrong date.

The hotel's construction was delayed by a series of mishaps, including cost overruns, injuries to laborers, and the loss of a shipload of Italian marble intended for the building. Again it was yet another visually stunning building to admire.

On a more recent and sombre note, at 18:55 local time on 17 August 2015, an explosive device composed of three kilograms of TNT stuffed in a metal pipe and wrapped in white cloth inside a backpack was detonated near the Erawan Shrine, killing 20 bystanders and injuring 125. This explosion and some other similar type incidents before this were thought to be politically motivated by extremist groups.

We viewed the shrine from the Skywalk and went into the building to try and get a drink but it was less retail focused, so we headed back to the Gaysorn mall for a refreshment break of a passion soda and an old fashioned iced chocolate - both of which were delicious. Finally, we stopped off at the local grocery shop at the Thong Lo BTS and picked up a few items for our evening dinner.

4 Dec 2024

Bangkok, Thailand