Bbbbbangkok

Our second day in Bangkok was delayed somewhat by the fact that we were KO'd from the night before. I had a ridiculously strong taste of tobacco in my mouth from a swedish chewing tobacco called 'schnooze'. Yep me neither. Once we dragged ourselves out of bed and showered we grabbed some food and headed into Bangkok again. (It's worth noting at this point that food is stupidly cheap. Think a curry, rice and a beer for just under 2 quid. Or pad thai the national noodle dish for 60p)

The rest of this day we did quite a lot of walking around and taking in the sights. Basically, Bangkok is a real mix of both old and new, rich and poor. For example, just around the corner from wooden huts on the side of the railway line, there is the biggest, most expensive mall I have ever seen. Absolutely jampacked with Prada, Hermes, Jimmy Choo, Cartier and all the other brands that we cannot dream of buying! The new parts of the city blew me away, the skyscrapers, sky train and underground were just a world away from back home and reminded me of the Tokyo I had seen on tv. However, the poorer parts of Bangkok put everything into perspective. Beggars are never easy to deal with but when they have children, are pregnant or disabled it was quite hard to see. Jumping from Skytrain stop to stop we took in only a fraction of the city but were able to absorb a lot of what it offers.

Later that night, we decided that we had fully recovered from the previous nights antics and were again ready to hit it hard. This time, Rob suggested that we check out Khaosan road early and get more of a vibe. Khaosan is cool to see now and again but it is very backpacker and doesn't offer the real Bangkok experience. Luckily, we have Rob's friend Aunsha looking after us, and as a Bangkok native, she knows everything there is to know. We all ordered a couple of buckets and set about getting on it. Steve was still with us at this point so we had a cool little group going on. I wasn't aware of how potent the Ssangsom whisky and coke bucket was so was really feeling it as we made our way to a bar that Aun often visited. Called Hippie de bar, this place was very cool indeed. It had an almost completely Thai clientele which made us feel like we were integrating ourselves more into the city. It also had the best toilet I've ever used, basically it was open so you could see the sky behind you and only had a plank of wood stopping you from falling.

At this stage, we were all tanked up and fancied moving to a club we saw earlier. Now the reason we wanted to go to this particular venue was because of a couple of clearly Swedish girls that had walked in earlier. From the outside it didn't look anything special but when we got in it was Mega. Much bigger than it looked with a raised DJ booth and lots of sound people. Suckers for more punishment we left this place around 3 and walked to a further place Aun knew about called Gazebo, now joined by a couple of Thai girls we had 'befriended'. It was in this club that I had the only relatively scary experience so far. Chatting to this Thai girl for quite a while I was in a seperate bit of the club to the rest of the guys when all of a sudden a policeman and a member of the bar staff grabbed me by the arm. I was taken into a cupboard and accused of stealing a bottle of whisky. Firstly, this sounds like something I would/do occasionally do. However, I honestly didn't know what they were talking about. I'd heard stories about Thai police scamming westerners and getting money out of them so I was a bit concerned at this point. They then put on cctv of the supposed theft of the bottle. It was committed by a boy in a grey t shirt like me, but he had blonde hair! After saying "That's not me" about 1000 times they finally let me go on my way. I'm still wondering whether it was racially motivated haha.