So I arrived in Bangkok on Friday afternoon, and met up with Jeff (brother) shortly thereafter. No flight complications - so it was easy. We took a taxi to the BTS (skytrain), and I'm pretty sure the metered taxi took us "for a ride"..:) The skytrain was very easy to navigate, and quite modern. After an easy transfer, we ended up at the Saphon Taksin station, which is where the hotel ferry's are. Each hotel has their own ferry, which are free. We caught the hilton one, and headed over.
The Hilton Millenium Hotel is very nice. I would put it at least in the top 5 hiltons I have stayed at - it's about 3 years old, the staff are amazing, and the hotel itself reminds me of a small vegas-style hotel resort (restaurants, a dance bar, etc). On the 4th floor there was a fake beach with a pool, reclining chairs, etc.
Friday night we wandered back to the BTS and to Silom Road. This was surely a sight: a busy night market, tuk tuk drivers yelling, advertisers yelling "DVD SEX" (and they FOLLOWED you), and more. Homeless people lying in the middle of the path - with various physi
cal defects (ie blind, no legs, etc). At one point I was hit with ice - this is to d
istract you while someone tries to grab your wallet. Yes - it was pretty insane, but you never feel unsafe - it's just different. We ended having a few drinks, leading to, uh, a small hangover on Saturday..:)
Saturday we had breakfast, and ended up lounging around the forth floor "Beach". Afternoon was back to the BTS to check out the modern shopping malls, see if we could see a Muay Thai show (too expensive sadly), and do some shopping. Fortunately we took
a day pass for the BTS, we ended up moving around on it quite a lot! We also checked out a fish aquarium - it was in the big
shopping facility called "Siam Paragon".
It was fun - perhaps a little too pricey for what we saw. However, there were a lot of neat, exotic fish to check out!
Saturday night was fairly quiet, by 9:30pm we were back at the hotel, had a dinner there (Jeff said "his curry tasted like Bangkok smelled"), and basically went to bed by roughly midnight. Sunday, here we are - booked an overnight train, bus, and ferry to Ko Samui, and are currently figuring out where we shall sleep!
