Day Seven, Part One: Downtown, the Golf Mall, supermarkets, and a flight to Chiang Rai

Today we had a slow start because we’re both a bit sick, we had to repack, and I had some job work to attend to. First stop was a coffee place by our hotel that has written testimonials from western tourists touting the quality of its coffee, including one from Seattle. Not bad espresso for Thailand. Second stop was 7-11, where we went to recharge Tenaya’s Thai SIM card. There appear to be four or five companies offering cell phone service here, and you prepay for minutes. You can buy cards in denominations ranging from 50 baht to 300 baht at stores like 7-11, type a code from the card into your phone, and recharge your account. It’s a very user-friendly process, even for non-Thai-speaking tourists buying the cards in stores where the employees don’t really speak English.

After 7-11, we decided to take the BTS to the regular downtown area to find a Thai massage place a friend had recommended. Unfortunately, we couldn’t manage to find the massage place, and most of the streetside places are far too sketchy to walk into without some sort of recommendation from a guidebook or friend, so no massages today. The downtown area, however, was fascinating—we saw strip clubs, prostitutes, massage places that are probably brothels, and random things like a guy with a table on the sidewalk sewing with an old sewing machine. We also saw what appears to be the “gay street” (probably one of many in Bangkok), with signs for gay bars, gay massage parlors, etc. What a country this is.

After our unsuccessful search for the massage place, we thought we’d wonder around some malls in search of food courts. No such luck. What we saw next, however, inspired what I’m going to call my Unified Theory of Thailand: When you’re off on a wild goose chase and don’t find or have trouble finding what you’re looking for, you will eventually find something totally unexpected that makes the initially fruitless search at least somewhat worthwhile. First was our longer-than-expected hunt for Dosa King, which led to us meeting that nice couple from Calcutta. Second was the longer-than-expected hunt for May Saidee’s, which brought us to the sketchy and wonderful Khao San Road (I’m calling it Operation Khao San Road in tribute to Meet the Parents). And third, today, was our stumbling upon the most unexpected and shocking sight yet: the Golf Mall.

Up until this point, everything I’ve seen in Thailand had been somewhat expected… beautiful temples, sketchy backpacker districts, prostitutes, chaotic open markets, tourists from other countries, etc. That all changed with the Golf Mall. We walked inside of what we thought was a normal shopping mall to see what there was to see. Tenaya said: “That’s odd, a golf store. Who plays golf here?” Then she pointed out another golf store. And another. We looked around the mall—a four story mall with an atrium—and realized that at least 50% of the stores are golf-related. Seriously. I don’t get it and don’t really have any expectation of ever getting it. If anyone reading this knows what this Golf Mall is or, more importantly, why it exists, please tell me.

After the Golf Mall, we headed back to the BTS stop by our hotel and decided to look around a supermarket, located in the basement of a Robinson’s department store. I always enjoy spending time in supermarkets in foreign countries because it gives me a reasonable sense of how the locals live (or, in the case of developing countries, how upper middle class locals live). Here (link to be added) are some pictures from the supermarket if you’re also the kind of person who finds supermarkets interesting. One interesting observation: They don’t sell alcohol after a certain hour and between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m. I don’t quite get that last part. In any event, I didn’t find the food in the supermarket’s food court appealing, so we wound up eating at a local chain pizza place because we were running short on time. The vegetable pizza wasn’t bad; it had very little cheese, which is probably designed to appeal to Thai tastes.

At that point, it was time to head off to the airport for our flight to Chiang Rai. We hopped in a cab (a new Toyota Matrix; our hotel’s Bimmer airport service was only included in our rate for a one-way trip) to Suvarnabhumi Airport, the new airport that handles all international and some domestic flights. I had checked and confirmed that our flight was from Suvarnabhumi, not the old, domestic-only airport, Don Mueng. We arrived at the airport and went to the domestic check-in counter, where were told that we had come to the wrong airport. I re-checked our flight info on my blackberry and discovered that, while we were at the right airport, I had somehow written down the wrong time, and we were late for the flight I thought we were on. Fortunately, the Thai Airways agent was already re-booking us on a different flight out of Suvarnabhumi and didn’t appear to be charging us extra, so I stayed quiet.

We stopped in for 20 minutes at the “Royal Silk” domestic business class lounge, which we had access to because business class on the Bangkok-Chiang Rai flight was only $20 more than the cheapest available coach seat, so I booked it. The domestic business class lounge for Royal Thai was packed with mostly foreigners, again making me wonder what this place must look like with tourism isn’t in a giant slump. We wound up spending another 30 minutes waiting at our gate because our flight was late. Something odd about the gate setup: Suvarnabhumi is a brand new airport, more modern than the average U.S. airport. Despite this, there were no electronic displays showing what flight was leaving from the gate—the gate agent had to write down the destination and flight number on a piece of paper and tape it to the counter. I can’t imagine the international counter looks like this; we’ll find out in a week and a half when we head home.

The flight itself was quite nice. I had thought we were on an A300, which is a rather old Airbus widebody that Thai Airways seems to use on many of its domestic routes, but instead we had an A330, the A300’s more modern replacement. Given that Bangkok Air served a meal on a 40 minute flight in coach, I was not surprised that Thai Airways also served a meal on a one hour flight in business class. Oddly, though, they don’t serve alcohol on domestic flights—I’ve never been on a domestic U.S. flight where alcohol wasn’t available, and Horizon Airlines, which specializes in short hops around the Northwest, even serves beer for free (albeit in relatively small quantities). (An observation about Thai eating habits: They seem to like toothpicks, which are provided with every meal I’ve eaten here, and the one time we’ve eaten a meal with a Thai so far, he used a toothpick after the meal.)