Thailand - Saturday April 7, 2007

We reached the Suvarnabhumi Airport by 3.15 am, local time. It was bigger than the Bangalore airport…. clean, beautiful, and organized. There wasn’t much room for confusion, though most of the staff here doesn’t understand English. There wasn’t any difficulty in getting the Visa, though the officer looked a lil rough. ‘Sleep’ can be one factor.

It took some time to find out the pre-paid taxi stand. They charged 400 baht to drop us at Amari Atrium Hotel ( http://www.amari.com/atrium ) located in New Petchburi Road.

The very first thing I got attracted is the Taxis in Bangkok. They were in different colors and that too bright. Taxis are more compared to own vehicles, which were mostly lightly colored. Taxis are THE attraction on the road. And they all are Toyota Corolla with A/C switched on all the time.




The roads were good and the drivers follow the lane system. It looked safe driving in Bangkok. Our taxi touched 120 km/hr and here people drive very fast. I was impressed with that aspect.


This hotel is good but certain others things were tricky and funny. You can use only two bottles of water per day, free of cost, though they provide three bottles (third one would attract 80 bt, for 500 ml). These bottles are kept far and there is another bottle kept next to your bed. In urgency, you may not re-think but use it. The catch is, they will charge you 120 baht for this bottle of 500 ml of mineral water (just outside, in the 7-eleven stores, you get one ltr for 14 baht!! Excellent marketing strategy.

There were so many other things in the room which are for sale at three times (or so) the MRP. May be this is how luxury hotels functions, I don’t know…..this is my first stay in such a hotel.

This hotel has a decent gym and pool. Food served in their restaurant is expensive but good. Breakfast was included in the rent but coz of technical problem with our check-in time, we were asked to pay. We overslept and missed the buffet!!! So, we had toast and tea.

Since it was Saturday (working days are ‘working days’ for wife, since she is on official visit) , we decided to pay a visit to one of the much talked about shopping mall/complex called MBK

Here we get all sort of ‘shopping’ items like, cloths, mementos, Electronic items (though there is another mall almost exclusively for it), pirated DVDs and stuffs like that. MBK is Bangkok’s one of the hot spot tourist area. Many hotels arrange bus to this place for their guests. I also bought a couple of T-shirts, like many other tourists did.

We came back at an odd time and the buffet lunch was over. So, we had Coffee and toast (but it was expensive and I decided not to have anything more from this restaurant since it would damage my budget).

There is an Indian restaurant next to our hotel and we had dinner from there and the rate was ‘OK’ compared to our in-house restaurant.
Is Bangkok a shopping paradise as projected? I might need a day or two more to comment on that.