Bangkok Part 2

Yesterday was Tuesday. The night before, people had told us about some places to go shopping so we decided to journey into shopping land. First we found the expensive shopping which wasn't what we were looking for. Then we found this magical place called MBK. I think the best way to describe MBK is that it's the biggest indoor, outdoor market you can imagine. It's kind of like a mall. 5 stories, and huge down and back. But it's like street vendors trying to sell you things. The best part about it is that it's air conditioned. That means we could pretty much do all the street shopping we wanted, but in an giant, air con facility.

The other really cool thing about MBK was the food. They had a huge variety of food (a little pricier than you might find on the street) but the food covered a huge span of countries. you could pretty much pick any "fancy food stall" (that's what I'm calling it) and get that countries food made for your right then and there. So we ate some delicious Indonesian food, and topped it off with Dairy Queen! That's right. I had a blizzard, which I haven't had since December. However this country still doesn't believe in cookie dough. That will be the greatest joy of going home still.

Once we were finished shopping at MBK (Brigitte and I made a few wonderful purchases) we headed back to the hostel to figure out our next step for the day and our next step for the next two days because we had nothing planned except that we maybe wanted to get out of town and go to a beach. But I'll come back to that.

We then went to Chinatown for dinner and more shopping. However when we got there, it was not at all what I had expected. I expected something similar to the Chinatown Ellen and I experienced in Malaysia. This was not the case. There were probably 2 dozen shark fin street stalls. At this point, Brigitte and I were starving and we thought we'd be able to eat when we got there. However the ONLY thing to eat apparently in Chinatown is shark fin or some other version of seafood. We did finally find a tiny restaurant on a side street that had other food, and it was quite good. However this is also where we saw our first rat and I'm still a little freaked out by that. But I'm trying to look past that and let it go because people eat around rats all the time, right? It's not like it was in our food or in the kitchen. And it's outdoors. There's bound to be some kind of wildlife.

Anyways, yesterday we booked our hotel for Pattaya, which is a beach town about 2 hours from Bangkok. We were all stoked to get to the beach instead of just hanging out around here. Then in the middle of the night, it started thundering like no one's business. Literally shook my bed. And it hasn't stopped pouring since. So we've decided to still go, hoping and praying that it lets up tomorrow a bit. Or today a bit would be even better but I'm not holding my breath. So our current journey to this place, in a monsoon includes the following:
Walk to subway station (5 minutes outside)
Ride subway to skytrain station.
Walk to transfer from subway to skytrain (it's quite annoying that the forms of transportation are in very different ground levels)
Ride the skytrain to the bus terminal.
Walk to bus terminal (don't know how long and if it will be covered or not, I'm guessing not)
Ride 2 hour bus to Pattaya
Hop on a songtaew which is the back of a truck used to transport you around the area (may or may not be covered, we're thinking yes because it rains so much here, we're learning)
Have it drop us of (no idea how) at our hotel or close to it (no idea where that is either)
Walk to hotel (dunno how long that'll be outside)

So that's what our adventure is today, I'll let ya know how it goes! Hope for the rain to stop, because I know I am!