Day 1

We arrived in Bangkok Airport after a long flight and were greeted by our transfer guide. I was lucky enough to be in the same bus as our transfer guide who introduced herself as “Nao”. Nao gave us a brief background of Bangkok, indicating the poorer areas (slum), the middle-class areas (where our hotel was) and the higher-class areas (business district). It was evident that Nao had a lot of respect for us through her humorous conversations with us on the drive to the hotel.

At 11:00pm we arrived at Hotel de Moc and settled into our rooms. A group of nine of us decided to go exploring the streets of Bangkok (despite our early start in the morning) and visit the night markets. There were dirty rubbish bags along the streets, stray dogs walking past, cockroaches scrawling from the gutters and cars, took-tooks & scooters driving in every direction. We soon quickly gained an understanding of our future surrounding environment. There were people everywhere; locals selling food & clothing from stalls and others trying to lure us into to strip shows, nightclubs other sexually explicit performances.

I am glad we ventured out for an hour or so as it has given me the opportunity to now compare the local environment in Bangkok to Luang Prabang and make several comparisons and similarities between the two cities. After wandering the streets and markets we all purchased some ice cream and made for our way back to the hotel.

So far all of the Thai locals I have engaged with have been polite and happy to offer assistance (i.e. taking photos, giving directions). However, was surprised at how much we were hassled by locals to purchase items from their stalls. It seems that the Thai people are quite desperate and persistent to make a sale. To me this suggests that the welfare level in Bangkok is quite low, particularly for the poorer-class. I look forward to making a further analysis of this during our time in Luang Prabang.