Bangkok - Arrival and Hotel Surrounds

The train pulls into Krung Thep Aphiwat station right on time at 8.10am. We had not been up and awake for very long. The carriage attendant turned our beds back into seats and we barely had time for any book reading before we had to get off the train. 

We found the MRT blue line and paid 20 Bhat each to get to the green line station. There we had to do a bit of walking to change lines and stations. Sarah spotted an awesome looking bakery and we fueled up there with enough to keep us moving. The metro trains are super full with work commuting people today. Sarah doesn't even need to hold on to anything. We are so packed in she can't possibly fall over. It did make getting off at our stop slightly challenging. A combination of English and French "excuse moi" and the crowd opens up for us. The green line train is a bit longer and costs 40 Bhat each. 

It was pouring with rain outside the arrival train station. The first time we have seen any rain on the holiday. Maybe we should have brought rain jackets? Nah. We purposely didn't as knew they would make things rain on the inside with this hot weather. We are happy to just get wet if necessary. However, when we exit the green metro station it's not raining very hard. Caps on heads and jackets on the backpacks is sufficient protection. Once the GPS settles and we took a few steps in the wrong direction I had things sorted and we took a small back alley route to our hotel. It was a good shortcut but not one you would do if arriving in the dark. 

We are staying at the Vince Hotel in Pratunam area. The hotel looks nice but we can't get into our room until 3pm. It's 10am so we leave our big backpacks with the hotel staff. They tell us we can take a shower in their lobby shower room which I do and I change my clothes again. Nicely refreshed we head out to explore the local area and try to get our bearings. We are keen to figure out where some of the local shopping markets are located. We find a couple of markets and while Sarah does a more in-depth tour of one I grab a coffee and muffin in a cafe. She then joins me for the same and finds me updating this blog. The sun is shining again so more exploring to come.

But before we left the cafe I noticed a familiar face. The man and the woman from the Surat Thani restaurant had just sat down. The woman who had seen Sarah's pineapple shake and ordered a watermelon one. Turns out they had left on a train two hours before ours but here they were in the same cafe in Bangkok. She is from Paris and he is from Rome. She is a teacher in her late 50s and he is recently retired. We get chatting to them for a while swapping travel stories, etc. She has just purchased a new suitcase for the shopping she is planning for the next few days. She thinks we should be buying one too. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that. How could you need to buy that much stuff? 🤔

We left the cafe and went to a shopping mall market thingy where Sarah purchased a couple of items and I bought a pair of sunglasses for in the car at home. We took a different route back to the hotel to check where another mall was located. Our room was ready before 3pm so we got our key and unpacked our bags. Then we popped back to the ground floor for our free welcome massage. A 15 minute Thai head and neck massage. Our first ever Thai massage. Massages are not something we are normally keen on. Sarah got off more lightly than I did. There were many more cracking sounds coming from my chair than hers! 😂 Massage completed we are chilling out in our room and will check out the roof top pool before figuring out where we can eat dinner tonight.