Street Food

Silom Soi 20. Our local street food hangout. Just around the corner from our hostel is a well known street food alley called Silom Soi 20. So far in five days we have eaten dinner there 5 nights and tried each of the main restaurants. The food is very cheap and you eat roadside on little plastic chairs next to seafood and produce, having to avoid the cars and scooters that drive down it. All of the food is cooked fresh as you order and it’s always really busy meaning a high turnover of fresh produce being used. A main Thai meal (a curry, noodles, pad Thai or soup) is roughly $2.50-$3.50NZD and a large beer costs around $4.50NZD.

Since Silom is the central business district, in the morning this market transforms into a grab and go breakfast and lunch street with completely different sellers to the evening. We have really enjoyed getting Thai breakfasts here for as cheap as $2 for black sticky rice and custard, steamed buns and Thai chicken curried rice.

Since it is our last night in Bangkok tonight we have told ourselves we have to go somewhere else for dinner and breakfast but we’ll see how that goes.

Malls (mall food courts)

We went to two main malls in Bangkok. Central World which has similar stores to home as well as some crazy extras like an ice skating rink. The second was MBK which is like nothing we have ever seen before. It is a discount and market style mall with vendors selling all sorts of crafts and clothing. Each level has a dedicated theme. We spent about two hours getting lost on the electronics level trying to find the right iPad photo adaptor. Both malls are huge and have very cold air conditioning so it’s a good way to spend a day when the air pollution is bad.

Our favourite parts about the malls are the food courts. They are not like back home, if you avoid the ‘western food’ level. At both malls we found the local food court level on the upper floors that have really high quality and cheap Thai food, comparable with street food prices. Pictures are of my literal spicy hot pot, complete with a flame under a cast iron pot and our chicken rice soup which we had for breakfast.

Temples

The Grand Palace

This is one of our highlights so far. It’s hard to describe what the Grand Palace is like because it is just so exceptional. The detail and quality of the craftsmanship is like nothing else.

Wat Pho – Temple of the reclining Buddha.

The recline Buddha is an enormous gold monument depicting Buddha reclining.

Wat Arun, The Temple of Dawn

This temple was shown on French maps as early as