Jet-lagged in the City of Angels

My first impression of Bangkok was endless traffic I could see out of the window of the minibus from the airport to the hotel.  Except when I fell asleep, but even that was because of the traffic on the roads. When the six other English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) I was travelling with and I got to the hotel, our main concern was to get to our beds as quickly as possible. At one point another girl was saying that we might not be able to get to our rooms until 2pm. I think I would have fallen asleep in their lobby as a protest. Thankfully, after we checked in, received our Thai phone sim and our keys we could take (in my case drag) our bags to our rooms. As soon as I put my pyjamas and the air conditioning on, there was no waking me. There are no words to describe how comfortable the bed was.

Only it did not last long enough. The hotel gave us only one key per room in the hotel, so I needed to be up to let my roommate, Kate, in. I answered the door in my pyjamas and she came in with two friends she had travelled to Bangkok with. As much as going out with them sounded good, a quick snooze and a long shower sounded even better. When it was time to get up I tried the shower…no luck. It was one that you had to use the bath taps and then press a button to make the water come out the shower. So I resigned myself to a very short bath.

Once I found some of the other ETAs we wondered around Bangkok for a bit and found some more teaching assistants and followed them to BKM, the shopping centre in Bangkok. To get there we ended up taking the skytrain. The skytrain, or BTS, is an elevated rapid train that goes around Bangkok and, most importantly, has air conditioning. It can’t have taken more than twenty minutes to get to BKM and it only cost 28 Baht (which is about 50p!). All we really did there was walk around and find a place to eat lunch. I ended up with Chicken Pad Thai. In hindsight I probably should have chosen an American or Italian dish.

That evening it was decided that we were going to a nearby rooftop bar. When I say we, I mean someone posted it on the facebook group and most of us decided to go there as well. It was worth following them though, the views were amazing!