October 22nd and here we were, finally heading to Bangkok. It might sound like a silly thing to say, but it is a strange thing when the day you have waiting for for months actually arrives. Even though we had been preparing all the stuff we needed in advance, when the day finally arrived we didn’t feel prepared at all.
Our journey started in Barcelona el Prat at 11:30. My father took us there. Once we checked our luggage we boarded on the first flight to Kiev. Ukraine International Airlines were kind enough to give us an exciting experience by moving forward the scheduled departure of the Kiev-Bangkok flight and by delaying the flight from Barcelona.
In the second flight we were delighted with an excellent TV dinner by UIA (actually it was not that bad, but you know, plane food). We entertained ourselves watching the first season of GoT (by the way it’s still awesome), taking turns to watch because the plane was full and we couldn’t be seated together 😥
But we survived! After 9 hours we arrived in Bangkok, got through immigration and got our bags. Then we took a touristy bus to the even more touristy Khao San Road and walked to our first hostel.
Our first half day in Bangkok was pretty busy considering we only slept about 3 hours in the plane. We needed to get a few things for the trip that we didn’t get at home, so we decided to go to the one of the biggest malls in Bangkok, MBK. We got there by boat, which was a pretty cool experience.
At MBK we were expecting to buy a towel, an umbrella (it started to pour suddenly on our way there) and some long pants for Joan to visit temples). Let’s just say we got none of those things and instead got some others. It was very confusing for us! There were sooo many stalls selling different things all mixed together. We also thought things would be cheaper and that we would be able to haggle a little, but many of the stalls had a sign that read ‘Fixed Price’. Perhaps we are not the best bargain hunters, but it was still hard to find what we needed!
We ended up eating at one of the foodcourts at the mall, and we enjoyed ourselves very much. We had some delicious noodles with fish balls (we think) and were very happy about it.
On our way back to the hostel, we saw a temple all lit up and couldn’t resist taking a look. We haven’t seen it in the morning yet, but it sure looked pretty at night. It was only us and a couple of monks there. And also a cat that insisted on being in our pictures.
And thus concludes our first day in South East Asia. Very tired but very happy to be here, we can’t wait to discover all of it.
As they say in Spanish, with this and a cake, until tomorrow at eight (although actually, until next week).