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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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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