Bangkok Trip - Day 1

Well, the day finally arrived in style, we were packed and raring to go on Saturday morning. Checking in 2 hrs earlier, ours being a budget carrier, we killed a lot of time in Singapore's budget terminal. Atleast I was feeling good that we chose the afternoon flight instead of the 6 am flight...I cant imagine walking around the place at 4 am!!!!

After a quiet flight and a lot of scenic island views later, we landed at Suvarnabhoomi airport. The size of the airport wowed us even as we were landing. The place is huge, a literal concrete jungle. Once out of the plane, we scrambled for the visa on arrival counter....well, things were not that easy as most officials operate on minimal english mode! Finally we did figure out the procedure and joined the long line. Our turn came a full 45 min later, and the questions were bit strict....why r u here?, how much money u have? show me the money, show me singapore id, etc...I can understand the strictness considering the fact that many ppl come there to work illegally. But this being my first such experience I was feeling a bit scared. Luckily nothing much happened and we got our visas and had our photos taken for that.

Next we located our hotel transport and soon we were on our way to the hotel. The airport is some 30 km from the city so we had a splendid view of the city scape. The huge road and massive flyovers are really stirking. Took us some 25 mins to reach the hotel....most of it through a expressway. Unlike singapore where all the sky scrapers are at one place, bangkok is full of sky scrapers vanishing into the horizon.

We had booked at the Majestic Grande hotel, a decent 4 star hotel. After checking into the hotel, we booked ourselves on a dinner cruise along the Chao Praya river. We were picked up at the hotel at 6 pm for the dinner curise which was at 7:30 pm. We realised later that one whole hour we were to spend in one of the shopping malls that hosted the pier. Nice tactic to get us to spend money at the mall. Anyways after wasting an hour, we finally boarded the Grand Pearl Cruise. It was a big and neat boat which could accomadate about 150 ppl.

The total cruise time was 2 hours, the boat took us through some famous landmarks of bangkok including the Wat Arun, Grand Palace, the rama VIII bridge and many other some spots. We had a lovely time taking pics and videos of the Wat Arun at night. Its a spectacular view, better than the day time. The rama bridge is also a very good sight....its a suspension bridge but with a difference and its huge. [Photos below: Wat Arun, Rama bridge]

Dinner was ok, a lot of variety but we hardly sat down continuously to enjoy dinner...all the time we were running from one side of boat to another taking snaps. There was also in-house thai dance. Two very bored ppl dressed up as thai dancers came danced and ran away....previously during our 1 hr wait at the pier, we were all given orchids and this thai dancer took snaps with us..... later during the end of the cruise, they came around selling the photos as souveniors...nice trick. we already knew this so didnt bother with the snap. It was a bit to commercial for my taste...the sense of hospitality vanished once they abruptly turn away to catch other ppl for the photos. Even when dancing, they were just doing their jobs without passion.

Anyways it was a very exciting start to our 3 day trip, and already one day was over. I was dying to see the beautiful temples or Wats, we had just seen along the river.