Travel Diaries #1 : Bangkok

Hello my dears,

Today we start with the first holiday post, together with some words, photos & impressions from Thailand's capital city, Bangkok. 

First of all, you already know how much we love to travel, and my advice to you is to travel as much as you can cause the world is so big and beautiful and each experience is enriching. You get to meet all kinds of people, with their different habits, you get to see all kinds of places & cultures, beliefs and ways of living. 

Thailand was by far the most enriching experience for me up to now, and I find it to be a country of big contrasts. However, I must tell you that we planned all our journey by ourselves, on the internet. The first step was booking the flights, which happend in October, while in January we booked the rest (hotels & co.). Regarding the hotels, we usually book them on trivago.de, but before that we always check them on holidaycheck.com and tripadvisor. Another advice while traveling to Thailand is to book good hotels, 4*/5* ones because the stars there are not the same as the ones in Europe.

 Since we wanted to see a little bit of everything, we had to book some additional national flights because Thailand is quite a long country so you need some days to travel from the northern part to south and we didn't have that kind of time to waste on the road.

Anyway, we finally decided upon three locations which we wanted to see during our two-weeks holiday:  Bangkok, Chiang Mai (in the northern part of Thailand) and Pattaya (in the south).

We landed in Bangkok on Sunday evening and we had two nights booked for this huge capital city. We took a taxi from the airport (a little tip here: it is cheaper to search on the internet for the best taxi company in Bangkok and book a cab in advance; we didn't know by then), which took us to the hotel, about 30-40 km away. It was already dark outside, but all the skyscrapers with the commercials on them, the towers of different temples which you could see from the highway and of course, the intense traffic, everything made the city look very colorful and agitated. One hour later we got to the hotel, which was truly a dream (if you want more details about it, send me an email), changed our clothes and went to have dinner. We heard that there was a 360-panorama-view lounge at the 31st floor, so after dinner we had to go there, even if we were dead tired. The view over Bangkok was absolutely amazing, it was warm, but windy and very relaxing..

The second day, which was in fact the only one we had for visiting the city, we woke up quite early and after breakfast, we took the boat from our hotel along the river up to another pier and from there we took another boat which was going to take us to the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, Wat Phra Kaew, etc., the most popular tourist attractions there. Right after getting off the boat, a guy came to us and showed us on the map a few more must-see places in Bangkok so we took a tuk-tuk and started to explore the city. Seeing Bangkok from the tuk-tuk is quite a funny & great experience and I totally loved it, even if the pollution levels are quite high in this city and you can't always breathe normally, especially when you stay behind a bus while waiting for the green light. After a day with the tuk-tuk you feel like you have diesel all over your face, haha. As someone who studied this not very long ago, I can tell you that the pollution is really high in Bangkok, the smog is everywhere and inhaling all the gases from burned fuel is quite harmful for our health, but it was once-in-a-lifetime experience, totally worth it. So what we saw during that day in Bangkok was the Golden Mountain, from where you can see the whole city, we saw some street markets and different praying places, we saw the Grand Palace, which is beautiful and so very golden but so full of tourists, and we saw another temple on the other side of the river, Wat Arun. Before knowing it, we were completely exhausted and wanted to return to the hotel, which was possible by taking a boat, again. 

At the end of the day we could only say that Bangkok is indeed a beautiful, but incredibly huge city, full of tourists, one of the most polluted ones I've seen and the time we stayed there was just enough for us to see the main attractions. The next day we packed our bags again and headed to the airport, we had a plane to Chiang Mai to catch. 

..to be continued

T-Shirt, Hat // H&M

Pants // Zara

Sandals // Primark