A night on the town

To continue where I left off from yesterday, we all spent the rest of the trip doing our little things, I watched the Lincoln Lawyer, another movie that wasn’t bad, just not remarkable.

The walk to immigration was happily punctuated by an officer of some description with a smiley badge embroidered on his uniform. I’d like to think he was the fun police, but it occured to us later that Thailand is the land of smiles, and they may be trying to push that image.

Next stop on our adventure was the Novotel Suvarnabhumi Airport Hotel, which we are fortunate enough to be staying at. Possibly one of the most striking features of it was the sheer size of the lobby. It’s 5 stories high, has rooms looking into it, several fountains, large trees, various cafe places, and it doesn’t feel cluttered.

The rooms are also quite a sight. In my case, Evgeny and I are sharing and have a king single each, and all the lights can be controlled from a console beside the beds (which I found after searching around the room for where to turn the lights off). The fact that we’re overlooking the airport is actually quite nice, for instance, it’s 11:40 right now and the entire thing is still bustling and alive, which isn’t conducive to sleep, but it’s pretty.

Now dinner was okay, it was half KFC, half Japanese restaurant, and a young coconut for me, though the story of how that came to pass is much more interesting than what I actually had for dinner. It all started with a train trip to a part of town which was supposed to have a lot of food places, and it may well have had restaurants, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell because of all the street vendors toting bootleg dvd’s, cheap jewellery and high fashion knock-offs. Though there were occasional bursts of seemingly ad-hoc food courts in the street where the food street vendors would congregate. After we spent a while wandering, we ambled accross an “international food court”, though in Thailand that would seem to mean they had both Thai food and KFC. Unfortunately for us we got there very near closing time, so nearly all of the local cuisine was gone and us heathens had to get KFC and a young coconut from somewhere that was still open. Though we got there so late that even after we bought most of KFC’s remaining stock, everyone still only averaged to half a meal. That’s when we started walking back to the train station hoping we’d come accross somewhere decent that was still open, and we were in luck! A Japanese restaurant at the top of a department store was still open, it’s a far cry from the food vendors on the street, but before the competition I’m not game enough to trust any of their food.

On a more visual note, I’m quite happy with how this image captured the dirty, grimey, smokey aesthetic of a Bangkok street market at night.

Back in the hotel now, and there is no internet provided… Not happy Novotel.

Syndicated on my blog