Thailand - Monday April 16, 2007

Thailand’s old name was Siam and now many people want to change the name back to Siam. This was started by country’s one of the senior and prominent historian Dr. Charvit Kasetsiri of Thammasat University. Country’s first constitution in 1932 had the name Siam and then Prime Minister Field Marshal Plaek took an arbitrary decision and changed it into Thailand, in 1939.

Today I paid a visit to Pratunam Shopping area, which is Bangkok’s biggest cloth market area. Since I don’t have any plan to buy any cloths, I did not walk around much. But it really was worth a visit. For men, there isn’t much variety but for women and girls (of any age) the choice is unlimited…prices are reasonable and one need to bargain a lot. This is a wholesale and retail market. I have never seen such variety of cloths in Bangalore, or better say in my life. It was the biggest mistake that I already bought some T-shirts before coming here. A must visit place in Bangkok from tourist point of view.

For lunch, it was sandwich.

The market leader in car is Toyota. I saw the following brands or cars too:

Honda
Sunny
Chevrolet
Benz
Opal
Mitsubishi
Isuzu
Ford - very few
Suzuki - very few

Hmmm, don’t remember others……Two wheeler market is dominated by Honda.

It is the Thai language that named a cat in the most appropriate way. In Thai, cat is ‘Mieaw’.

Luckily the ‘India Gate’ opened today and had dinner from there….Thai fried rice and sweet lassi.