Bangkok- very first impressions

As I am sitting in my (surprisingly nice, clean and quiet) hostel room at the local time 2:24 and cannot sleep because in UK is only 20:24, I am quickly going to summarize my first impressions of Thailand.

First of all - British Airways, although it was OK travelling with you, you do not even come close to Emirates standards. It is very hard to explain what exactly is making the difference but I can definitely say that the biggest problem i had with you is food; for dinner there was at least a choice of something vegetarian and your selection included thai chicken and four cheese pasta (I did and would not expect a choice of something vegan, come on, we are in the air and its good there is a food at all) but breakfast gave no choice at all making everyone eat english breakfast consisting of bacon, sausages, eggs, few little mushrooms and tomato and for dessert a pot of yoghurt (out of which I only ate vegetables) and no wonder I was starving when arrived to Bangkok city center.

While approaching the ground for landing, from the airplane window I noticed that the houses and fields for growing veg are sitting perfectly and evenly parallel to one another, almost as if someone draw a location of them with the ruler. It was quite a different view from EU where most of the time there are only clusters of houses that are evenly spread, not a whole big areas.

My airplane landed around 15:00 but by the time I got out of the airport, took almost 1h (and £10) ride in a taxi and refreshed and organized myself in the hostel it was already 18:00.  The hostel itself surprised me in a very good way, one night in a single private room cost me £8, it has free WiFi and even have shampoos and shower gels freely available for everybody. It is much nicer than many places I stayed in across Australia. Only weird thing is that you have to take off your shoes at the reception and even when going to the toilet you should have bear feet. Also, to my relief the toilet itself are very clean and look like 'our' western toilet, not just the whole in the ground.

I knew Darwin checked in earlier today but when I was ready to go, he still wasn't back from the town, and after consultation with the receptionist I headed to the closest main road for something to eat on my own. I was almost tempted to go to the BMK for some shopping (as I needed to buy a plug adapter which I refused to get in UK knowing it will be way cheaper here) but the receptionist told me its 1h walk (I didn't want to take the bus, just wanted to stroll around) and that they are closing in couple of hours anyway. Oh well, we will go there tomorrow.

As I hit the main road, my first thought was that it reminds me a little bit of Italy: hot and humid, narrow roads, crazy traffic, motorbikes everywhere, chatty locals, shops, bars, and places serving food also everywhere and open till late hours. The main difference was that there was no constant horns noise, Thais seem to be more patient than Italians :)

I quickly noticed that the food stands do not look very well; the fish looked like they were fried in the morning and stood there all day and at one place which actually looked good enough, they didn't speak english so I decided to give up. I found a little cafe/restaurant that you actually go in and sit rather than eat on the street. It had 6 tables and only one was free, and there were at least 10-15 people around there so I thought it must be a popular place. As I walked in and ordered i quickly realised that all these people are... a members of the family running the business, all of them; from the little girls running around to the old man who had to be a grandad, and I was the only customer there. Nevertheless, I had a random noodles with prawns from the menu which was delicious and a bottle of thai beer which (little did I know) was huge and must have been 750ml. My bill was just under £4.

I then headed back to the hostel where I met Darwin who happened to be hungry so we went back to the main road to feed him. He bravely ordered food from the food stand and for a good portion of duck, rice and miso soup he paid 35 baht (something like £0.60-£0.70!).

On the way back we popped to one of the small supermarket (more like convenient store) as I was wandering and hoping that I will be able to find some sort of cereal for breakfast and maybe soy milk if I'm lucky. Unfortunately it looks I'll be struggling with this one, there was nothing like it there and the only soy milk I found was a sweetened milk in small cartons, looking like a drink for kids.

As a final first impression of Bangkok, I believe it is down to the area our hostel is in, as for a whole evening I have seen only maybe 5 white people around. Also I was kind of hoping there will be more locals speaking english, but again I might be completely wrong and just unlucky with the people I tried to ask for directions in not very touristy area. I am looking forward to see other districts of Bangkok to see how they are like.

PS.My touristy photo instinct still has to wake up as I didn't take any pictures today! Wakey wakey!