Day 3 of What to do in Bangkok for a Week. For the rest of the days, please skip to the end of the post.

After the previous night’s fruitless quest for a decent dinner, I put my foot down and informed my sister that I will not go anywhere until I get a proper breakfast, so we went to Siam Paragon, had the first of our several daily plates of Mango and sticky rice, fresh coconut juice, and the yummiest hash browns and fries with a Tom Yum spice mix they call larb (I pray to God it didn’t have any lard in it).

It’s worth mentioning at this point that my sister decided to take her entire luggage (backpack) with her because “it wasn’t that heavy”  and because “ain’t nobody got time to waste in traffic back to the hotel before having to leave for the airport”. This way, we would minimize the time spent on the road, she said.

We then headed on to Platinum Shopping Center, because when in Bangkok, am I right? We didn’t particularly need/want anything from Platinum Shopping Center, but a couple of Bangkok experts had really hyped it up and we figured we might find some funky t-shirts (similar to the ones we look for in Chinatown KL), and some elephant pants without the elephants on them.

Platinum Shopping Center was a madness of it’s own. You could spend a whole day there, should you have the patience and gusto to do so. Tight lanes, lots of stall-like shops selling unbranded things and replicas, and a whole lot of chaos. The variety inside is HUGE, and it makes sense because the majority of the locals do not buy or wear branded clothes. We did find one pair of hammer pants, a few t-shirts, and other random but very cool things from a store called Moshi Moshi, like small plastic bags that look like bunnies whose ears knot up to close the bag. Word of advice on the t-shirts: they shrink. I’m a size small, and I bought mediums because I wanted longer, comfier ones to wear to bed. One wash and they shrank to smalls.

 

After Platinum Shopping Center, we were supposed to go to Lebua State Tower for the quintessential Hangover 2 scene recreation. At this point, my sister realized that she forgot her passport and wallet in the hotel safe. Brilliant. So much for efficient time allocation.

We decided to cut our losses short, accept that Lebua can’t happen, and headed back to Siam Center for another round of Pad Thai, Som Tam, and several rounds of chilled, refreshing drinks. A not so quick trip to the hotel and we set off to drop our sister off to DMK.

The exciting part about DMK was that they have a Cha Tra Mue outlet! This guaranteed that even just before boarding the plane, my sister had a Thai Milk Tea soft-serve.

After dropping her off, we felt a little liberated. Don’t get me wrong, we love my sister, but since she was only in Bangkok for 3 days, she seemed to want to do too much in too little time (and she’s a bully) and all M and I wanted to do was take it slow and stroll through malls and supermarkets. You may laugh, but I love raiding foreign supermarkets. Unheard of ingredients fascinate me to no end, and I always save enough luggage space for the supermarket haul. We asked the driver to take us to the nearest mall, and got off at Terminal 21 Shopping Center.

By default, we followed our instincts and ended up on the lower ground level, which was a total stroke of luck because it was also the last day of a pop-up farmers’ market. It was here that we found the most amazing, crispiest, ridiculously good rice crackers drizzled with coconut palm sugar caramel. The lady was making them fresh, right in front of us.

I saw many locals taking home bagfuls of these, and I knew for a fact these are worth taking home. We brought lots and lots back, and they didn’t go stale for weeks (thats only how long they lasted before we wolfed them all down). Best buy of the trip.

Dinner was sticky rice and mango, because when in Bangkok, am I right? For dessert, I ended up purchasing gorgeous, handmade, teakwood spoons in just about every shape and size.

To get back to our hotel, we just stepped out of the mall and straight into Asok BTS station, and our hotel was at the next stop, which was Phom Phrong.

To read Day 1 of What to do in Bangkok for a Week, click here

What to do in Bangkok for a Week Day 2, here

What to do in Bangkok for a Week Day 4, here

What to do in Bangkok for a Week Day 5, here.

What to do in Bangkok for a Week Day 6, here.

What to do in Bangkok for a Week Day 7, here.