Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 4

Aug 03, 11 Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 4

Posted by in Food, Travel

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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Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 3

Aug 03, 11 Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 3

Posted by in Food, Travel

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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Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 2

Aug 02, 11 Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 2

Posted by in Food, Travel

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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Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 1

Aug 01, 11 Sights, shopping and massage in Bangkok – Day 1

Posted by in Food, Travel

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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Price discrimination in the world of airlines and how I maximised it on Jetstar, Tiger Airways and Air Asia

Jul 10, 11 Price discrimination in the world of airlines and how I maximised it on Jetstar, Tiger Airways and Air Asia

Posted by in General, Travel

In classical economics, price discrimination is when an identical product is sold for different prices to different customer segments. Of course, theoretically this should not happen, but we see it all the time! A Sweet Talk bubble tea sold at a busy MRT station can be $1.80, whereas a location slightly further away from the same MRT station can be sold for $1.50. A dress sold at a pushcart can cost $20, while the exact same dress (since most pushcarts and blogshops tend to get it from the same manufacturer) can be sold for $16 online. Likewise, airlines practice price discrimination in order to maximise their profit. People who are willing to book tickets 9 months in advance can get tickets as low as $1 (not including taxes that is), whereas people booking tickets 3 days before a flight would have to pay a premium. However, there is yet another form of price discrimination that people don’t usually know about. The booking of 2 single trips VS a return trip! Take a look at the fares above. I got the screen shots within 5minutes of each other. At this point of time according to XE, the THB to SGD rate is 0.0403021. So, a return fare is S$246.90, whereas 2 single trips booked is S$114.95 + THB2699.00*0.0403021 (S$108.78)= S$223.73! A savings of S$23.17 with just 5 to 10 minutes of additional effort! Of course,  your credit companies might charge you a lousier rate for the exchange, but they would typically not charge more than 1% spread. I use Mustafa Forex as a typical money changer indication, and they are currently quoting 0.040/0.0409. Based on Visa’s rate and a administrative fee rate of 2.5%, I got 0.0416. That means at worst, you would be charged S$112.28 for the BKK to SG single trip. That’s still a saving of S$20 or so. Likewise for another airline, A return fare costs S$222.87, whereas 2 single trips costs S$80 + THB3570 * 0.0403021 (S$143.88) = S$223.88. In this case, there is...

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Kiseki @ Heeren

Aug 26, 10 Kiseki @ Heeren

Posted by in Food

Finally managed to try Kiseki!. I probably heard of this buffet joint 2 months back when it first opened. Basically, I understand it’s opened by the same group of owners as Shokudo Japanese Bazaar (at Raffles City). The main difference is that for Shokudo, you walk around with your card to charge it to your card. Whereas for Kiseki, it’s buffet style! I went for the weekday dinner one, which is pretty decent at $29. The weekend dinner is slightly more expensive at $35. And I figure if I had to pay $35, I would much rather go to the higher end joints like Hanabi, which would be fairly similar in pricing anyway. One thing I really like about the place is the seating arrangement. It’s fairly similar to Shokudo and marche, where food stalls are scattered everywhere, and the tables are located closer to the sides. Somehow, the place don’t look as crowded this way. Perhaps it’s because it was a weekday night.   Food wise, not exactly the most fantastic quality, but definitely not lousy food. Initially, I had fairly low expectations, after reading the various reviews at HungryGoWhere.. But after our first round of food servings, the quality was actually quite decent! Fairly decent variety of food. Some of the foods are probably cheap fillers, but there were enough ‘core’ food to make the buffet worthwhile. The desserts are average. Not too much on the cakes and pastries selection. I quite like the waffles and ice cream though. Overall, I think I would definitely give them another visit! If you guys are free, weekdays lunch seem to be a good bargain at...

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