Night Bazaar

cars, originally uploaded by Dianthus.

This morning D had arranged a meeting with another real estate agent. Nong met us at our hotel, we hopped into her car and we were off. Where as last time we had only looked at houses, Nong had a list of 6 places that were a mixture of townhouses, apartments and condominiums. D and I were a little wary of the apartments and condominiums because of the dogs, and if there would be space for them to be outside. All of the places were off of Sukhumwit Road, which is where the majority of ex-pats live. D and I have had mixed feelings about living there. On one hand, we don’t want to miss out on the fact that we are in Thailand and want to really experience Thai life, but we also like the fact that we wouldn’t be the total outsiders in the neighborhood. We ended up liking the first and last places we saw for very different reasons. The first place that we saw was a townhouse in a “compound” (basically a little development that is enclosed and usually has a guard at the gate). It was quite large (5 stories!) with a small backyard patio area (with a wall as tall as me) that looked out onto the neighbor’s garden, along with the (not too bad) kitchen and maid’s quarters on the first level, the second level was all living room with a mini bar and sliding glass doors that looked out onto the common area/garden and pool. The rest of the floors were the bedrooms, each with their own bathroom. The last place we saw was an apartment in a brand new building. Sleek and modern, with an awesome kitchen! It is on the 15th floor, so the view was pretty spectacular. The building has a gym and pool and the entire building has wireless internet included in the rent. It was very hard not to be wooed by how cool everything was. Nong dropped us back at our hotel, and told us to call or email her with any questions. We were both hungry for lunch, so we headed over to an Irish pub near D’s office to discuss what we had just seen. After lunch we walked around a little bit, and then headed back to the hotel to cool off for a little while.
D had been eager to take me to the Suanlum Night Bazaar Market for dinner. We were both feeling up for it and we decided to walk over and check it out. Unfortunately, the Night Bazaar is across 2 major roads from our hotel. We made it across the first on a pedestrian bridge; we were not so lucky on the second. We found some other people who were trying the same thing (power in numbers!). We waited for the light to change and scooted across. The cars aren’t the scary part of Bangkok traffic; it is the motorcycles. They will go anywhere – into the oncoming traffic lanes, between the cars, next to the curb, even up on the sidewalk! They often seem to come out of nowhere.
The Night Bazaar is broken into two areas. There is the shopping area, with row after row after row of little stalls selling everything imaginable, and then there is the food area. It’s like being at a carnival or something. Food vendors line one side, and beverage vendors the other with tables and chairs in between. At one end there is a stage, where local music groups were performing. One odd thing is you have to buy these coupons for food and drink. We weren’t quite hungry yet, so we wandered up and down the rows of stalls (I picked up 2 t-shirts). D went to turn in some baht (later discovering that she had been totally shorted and ripped off by the person at the counter, it sucked) and got some coupons. We wandered up and down the food stalls, where you could find all sorts of things to eat. We settled on a gyro with chicken. All the fixin’s and some hot sauce too, so tasty! We took our food over to one of the tables and were quickly inundated with beverage choices. Beer is the big drink here (yay!) and almost all of the major beers were represented. We turned away Asahi, Paulaner, Tiger Beer, and several fruit smoothies. D was set on getting Beer Chang, a Thai beer. Sadly, we were unable to flag down the Beer Chang waitress. I ended up getting an Asahi and sharing it with D. After dinner, we walked around the stalls a bit more looking at all the different stuff for sale. We decided that once we have a place to live, it would be fun to come back and get some stuff for the house. We started to get tired, and decided to head back to the hotel. Neither one of us was particularly excited to play ‘Frogger’ to get back across the road, so D suggested taking a tuk tuk. I agreed, excited and nervous since the tuk tuk drivers are as crazy as the motorcycles. I knew it would be an adventure for sure. It was hilarious watching D negotiate with the driver. He threw out a pretty high number, and she said “I can take an air-conditioned taxi for that much!” He came down a little, but D stuck to her guns and ended up getting the price she wanted. We climbed in the seat and zoom! off we went. Tuk tuks have a pretty distinctive sound, like an old scooter with the muffler removed. We took every turn like we were in the Indy 500 and were back at our hotel in no time.