Where's Wally?

After a great night’s sleep in our new apartment, a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, it was time to revisit the One Bangkok mall. Now, last year, this was a new mall, and we discovered it a bit later during our stay in the Sathorn area (the Home Exchange with Neko the dieting cat!). We actually visited it for the first time on the 24th December, and because we liked it so much, we decided that we would go back there again for our Christmas Day, as it was going to be a different sort of Christmas for us anyway. The cool thing was that, unlike back home, where everything sort of closes for Christmas Day, in Thailand, a primarily Buddhist country, it’s pretty much just a normal day like any other. Of course, it’s odd for us to be seeing Christmas Decorations and hearing Christmas songs when the weather is like 30 odd degrees centigrade and some malls are dishing out fake snow….but I’m not complaining in the slightest.

So off we trot. The girls were heading back to Terminal 21 to take something back and also to get their nails done (all part of their preparations for a Thailand side trip), so we will see them later back in the apartment.

It was about 9.30 am when we left the apartment. There is a free shuttle that goes from Pleon Chit BTS station (a 10-minute walk from the apartment) to the One Bangkok complex (about a 20-minute walk from our complex, but in the opposite direction from the BTS). Are you still with me? Anyway, we decided to just walk as we like to find our bearings on foot, and as it’s still early, the weather is not ridiculously hot yet. We need to walk along Wireless Road (Thanon Witayu), and it’s always a pretty busy road, especially during peak time rush hours. No sooner had we set foot on the road than we came across a morning market and had a quick look at the foods being sold. We had just had breakfast, so there was no need for more food just yet, but it's always good to take a little peek at what's on offer in the local neighbourhood. Onwards we went and passed the American and Japanese Embassies.

One Bangkok is a massive complex, and I won’t go over it all again here, as I know I covered it in last year’s blog post for this mall. The key thing that we noticed this time was that the mall overall was a LOT quieter than it was last year. Granted, it was a Tuesday morning that we were visiting it and I can imagine that it might be a lot busier at both the weekends and in the evenings. A lot of the shops were also quite quiet, and some were still closed, or there were units due to open (or perhaps some shops had closed and moved to other locations since last year). We were quite surprised by this, and we have concluded that the Thais may have a bit of a ‘mall culture’. By that I mean, there are new malls constantly being opened, and people seem to flock to these until the next new mall opens. This is a bit of a shame as all the money, thought and work that goes into each of the malls must be enormous, and it must be disappointing for the staff and retailers when the visitor numbers drop.

Where’s Wally?

Another very interesting point we noted was that the mall was in the process of getting its regular window cleaning done, and that, my friends, is not for the faint-hearted.

It’s difficult to get an idea of the size of this mall from the photos, but see if you can spot the window cleaners in the background? And shame on you if you thought I was talking about my beloved husband…. There's actually about 5 window cleaners in this photo, but they look TINY here and the ropes come down from the top of the building!  The scale is nowhere like the window cleaning in my old workplace.

As you can guess, we headed to the 5th floor food court for lunch and just before the lunch locust crowd descended. I had a very spicy Tom Yum with chicken, which I could not finish (and which I paid for the next day as it sped through my gut!). R had a delicious roasted duck dish. I was a little jealous of his dish, which I did see, but I didn’t want to wait in the big queue for this.

We spent ages looking around the place and found two fabulous shops, which we spent ages in. One was a Thai craft store, and the other was a huge Daiso store. Daiso is a Japanese store which has amazing items at fantastic prices. We picked up quite a few items here, including some more compression bags and some tiny shopping bags.

After walking around for hours, we needed a wee rest, so we headed to the KFC and had a cooling drink and an egg tart each. I do like their egg tarts. We also took two back with us for the girls.

After picking up a couple of microwave dinners from the TOPS supermarket on our way home, that was us for another day. We could chill and relax.

Today's route

Day 15, 9 December 2025

Bangkok, Thailand