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Suan lum night market has been one of the ‘must visit’ places in Bangkok for a tourist to go. However, the land lease expired in 2007, and the tenants had been illegally occupying the landtill Jan/Feb of 2011 before they were all chased away. And suddenly, there’s nowhere to go to experience the night market atmosphere in Bangkok! In the recent months, the closest replacement is Tawanna Square, which is somewhat like a wholesale center but extended outdoors using tentages. The day started with a quick visit to the tailors to do the fitting for my orders. For people who do tailoring while skipping the fitting session, you might as well just buy off the shelf. The fitting for both the tailors I used were quite good, but as expected, alterations had to be made in order for it to be better fitted. A quick meal at Pasta ‘n’ Noodles was surprisingly good! It was just one of those restaurant type places along the road near Nana BTS. The food looked decent and the price was good, so we went in. And as usual, we were the only customers in the restaurant. Now I’m wondering where do locals eat!?! After that we made our way to Phetchaburi MRT station to get to Asoke Pier which was just walking distance away. One of the unique feature of Bangkok is how river transport is an essential form of transport there. From 1 end of the river to the other, it’s probably around a 80 minutes boat ride, and if you were to travel the same distance on taxi, it would have probably cost 200 baht and maybe 2 hours given the traffic congestions! Tawanna Square is located right beside Mall Bangkapi, which is a pretty large mall in a suburban type of district. But most importantly, it has it’s own pier! Being tourists, it makes more sense to ‘do as the locals do’ and take the boats rather than to rely on taxis right? There’s basically...
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Day 3 of the Bangkok trip was something different. Not many people know that Bangkok is the home to one of the largest amusement and water park in South East Asia; Siam Park City. That said, even the locals don’t know what it was! I got onto a cab, and told the driver Siam Park City. He looked a bit confused and I told him Suan Siam, which is suppose to be the Thai name for the place. He still looked a bit confused but he wanted business, so he moved off. A minute later, he turned to ask, “Siam center, shopping?” He thought that we wanted to go to Siam Center/Discovery/Paragon area, which is right in the center of the shopping district. We replied negatively and he still act confused. We eventually went up to a hotel to get a bellboy to translate. It seemed like the bellboy knew where we wanted to go, but the driver certainly didn’t. He responded that he knew though. So he sent us to Siam Paragon. Gah. Being nice people, we still paid him, for wasting a good 30 minutes of my time, and driving me further away from the amusement park. I asked 2 other cabs, and they both didn’t know where or what it was! Finally I found a tourist booth, managed to get a map with the address of the place. But seriously, how helpful can it be when the address of Siam Park City is “1 Siam Park Avenue”? No matter, we flagged a cab, got into it, showed the driver the map with the location. Even with that, he had to call his friend over the phone to get directions on how to get there. Luckily though, we managed to get there before it was night time. Ugh. We started the day with the hotel’s buffet breakfast. Since we booked the hotel rooms using Agoda, it was a room only booking with no breakfast included. However, the reception gave us a 1-use-only voucher...
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Day 2 of the Bangkok trip is basically the typical holiday itinerary for Bangkok. Tailoring for guys, followed by Pratunam area (or more specifically Platinum Fashion Mall) for shopping, followed by a sumptuous Chinatown sharks fin seafood dinner. There was quite a few tailors recommended on HardwareZone Forums, namely Boss Avenue, Crown, Pinky and a few others. Since I was nearer to Nana/Asoke area, I decided to try Boss Avenue and Crown, since they were quite well known and easy to find. You could practically see the signboard for Boss Avenue from the BTS! I’ll probably write a longer post about the clothing quality after I have worn it for 2-3 weeks, but at this moment, I quite prefer Boss Avenue’s cutting and cloth type. Although I have to say, Boss Avenue tends to stick with the common and safe cloth selections. So nothing fanciful for sure. Next is the compulsory visit to Platinum fashion mall in the Pratunam area. Platinum mall is kind of like a bigger version of bugis village, where fledgling blogshops like to get their stock from. The clothes aren’t exactly dirt cheap, but they do have a large range of designs and styles! If you are travelling in an all-guys group, feel free to skip this! Pratunam is essentially a shopping region. In fact, Pratunam is so popular with Singaporeans, that most of the time, they stay in the hotels around that area, such as Amari watergate or Metz Pratunam. One of the main reason is that Pratunam is actually some distance away from Chit Lom BTS(the nearest BTS), and having a hotel nearby would be helpful if you are lugging 5 plastic bags of purchases. For those staying in other parts of Bangkok such as Sukhumvit or Silom, the easiest way is probably to take the BTS to Chit Lom, walk pass Central World, across the bridge and there you are. A short little 10 minutes walk. The last destination for the day is Chinatown for the ‘cheap’ seafood! It’s...
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Bangkok is one of the most popular holiday destination for a Singaporean. Largely because there is so much to do! There’s cheap food, cheap massage, great sights, reasonable tailoring, diverse range of shopping options, and even an amusement park (which nearly nobody knows about!) I have went to Bangkok once before last year, and the plan for this trip is not to repeat destinations. So the plan this time is Day 1 Chatuchak weekend market Siam Paragon Day 2 Tailor shirts Platinum mall (yes, the only repeat, because it is unavoidable when you go to Bangkok) Chinatown (for seafood) Day 3 Siam Park City (Apparently one of the largest amusement park in South East Asia) Baan Khanitha (Some Thai style fine dining restaurant) Soi Cowboy Day 4 Mall bangkapi Tawanna Square (the supposed substitute for Suan Lum night market after it was closed) Day 5 Baiyoke Sky Hotel (For the Bangkok Sky Restaurant buffet lunch) Quite a different experience from the previous round, since the previous round was more sight seeing of the temples, and all. We ate a lot, we shopped a lot, we spent a lot. As usual, I flown in on Jetstar on the early morning flight. The good thing is that there is now the Suvarnabhumi Airport Rail Link that takes you from the airport to the city in 30 minutes for just 35 baht. Definitely no reason for travellers to take taxis! And this is probably where the BKK train system is more practical than the Singapore’s system. Their MRT and Airport Link system uses a non-card contactless system. That means, you buy a token from the ticketing machine, tap the chip on the entry like how you would in Singapore, and at the exit point, you drop it into the exit gantry. So, you don’t have to take your single trip EZlink card to the ticketing machine to get back your deposit. Which also means, you don’t have to pay for deposit in the first place! Why isn’t...
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I was recently on my way to town on a Saturday afternoon, and I tell you, I was in for a shock! The number of cars along the CTE and within Orchard/City Hall area are crazy! I remember quite some time ago on a Saturday evening, I drove from Newton to Suntec. It was actually quite a short route, just round novena, then the back of KK hospital, past little india, then straight on to suntec. Shouldn’t take too long since the train ride from newton to city hall was just 10 minutes or so. The drive took 45 minutes. And not only that, the searching for a parking lot at suntec took another 20 minutes. Madness. So I was wondering, is there a reason for this? The first thing that came to mind was that I will definitely take public transport the next time I go to town. The second thing that came to mind was Off-Peak Cars. Off-Peak Cars are basically red plate cars that are allowed to drive only between 7pm to 7am on the weekdays and full days on the weekends. In return, they get a form of rebate off the purchase price of the cars. The essence behind this scheme was that they wanted to keep the roads as congestion free as possible during office hours, so that logistics can move fast, couriers can deliver parcels with minimal delays, and people will be able to get to meetings without 1 hour traffic jams like in other regional cities. (Think Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Beijing, Jarkarta) In this aspect, the Off-Peak Car scheme has been very very successful! Now, you only get traffic congestions before 9am, and after 6pm! Inconvenience yes, but pragmatic too. The problem is you get a flood of cars on weekends! Every normal plated cars and Off-Peak cars will be flooding the roads, particularly to places with shopping malls. (which in the case of Singapore, tend to be congregated together) While I can’t say it is an...
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There was quite an interesting open letter on Temasek Review that’s written by a Secondary 4 student griping about the Singapore education system. Not to take anything away from her, I will only quote the first 2 paragraphs: I am a Secondary Four student at Nan Chiau High School, and am due to take my O Levels this year. Being shown first-hand what the education system is like, especially from a fairly unflattering point of view, has made me realise much about the education system that I do not like. Of course, I am fully aware that no education system is perfect, yet in the spirit of transformation the PAP has hopefully adopted since the 2011 General Elections, I write this letter to you in the hope that some of these problems with our system will indeed be changed, or if not, at least reviewed. I speak just for myself, and not for all other graduating students in Singapore when I say this, but I do feel strongly about many methods being employed in secondary schools, especially for graduating classes. For one, I have come to realise the serious emphasis the education system has placed on factual memorisation. Perhaps it is just used in my school, or maybe even a method most autonomous or government schools apply, but based on personal observation, I have come to the conclusion that students are often not taught to ask ‘Why?’ More can be seen from her facebook note post. I first read it last night, and by that time, it was already on the web for several days (hurhur, in internet time, several days means the news is outdated!) and thus there were already a big chunk of comments. Personally, she reminds me of Nicole Seah: Angsty, and maybe sidelined by the current system. I commented that, It’s already been said before last time.. In Singapore, students are not taught; they are trained. Trained for performing a certain role/job for the bigger purpose of being a productive worker in Singapore....
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