Get Thai'd

Shoppers hunt for counterfeit goods at the MBK Center

Today was a day of shopping, shopping, and more shopping. Exactly what I came halfway around the world to do, right?

My sister, myself, and our parents started off at the ICONSIAM mall again. We poked around various shops, mostly looking at clothes. My mother and sister wanted to look at the high-end clothing shops while my father and I were on the hunt for certain types of deals, so after an hour or two, we split up, with Mom and Jenny staying at ICONSIAM while my father and I hopped in a Grab (the Thai ride-share app) and headed toward a ridiculously huge shopping mall called the MBK Center.

The MBK Center, according to Wikipedia, was the largest shopping mall in Asia when it opened in 1985. It's eight storeys tall and several football fields long. The thing seriously stretches on farther than the eye can see. There are quite a number of reputable shops and an even larger number of disreputable shops where one can purchase all sorts of cheap and/or counterfeit goods.

Looking down from one end of the MBK Center mall toward the other end

I bought a blower bulb for my camera for 200 baht (I could probably have bargained it down to 150 but 200 was cheap enough). While walking past a retailer selling jewelry, I noticed that the retailer was selling fake high school class rings. The rings said "HIGH SCOOL" (yes, without the H in school). Somewhere on this planet there are people running around with HIGH SCOOL rings who don't know that it's misspelled. Yikes! I wanted to snap a photo but the retailers understandbly don't want you taking photos of their wares.

Oh, and I also came across the P. P. Shop. I have no idea if the proprietors know how, uh, how wrong that sounds to English speakers.

The P. P. Shop, where one can presumably buy P. P.

It seems that there are tons of names like that here in Thailand. There's Bangkok, the Bang Rong Pier in Phuket (pronounced foo-KET, though I'm sure there are tons of people who read it as "fuck it" at the first go), and there's even an outfit that makes electrical junction boxes called Kumwell. I'm sure I could find plenty more perfectly innocent yet dirty sounding names here if I searched; this is just scratching the surface.

If you're going to name something in English, maybe run it past an English speaker first

After a long, long day of shopping, my father and I met up with my mother and sister, and the four of us had dinner together at the ICONSIAM mall. The dinner was incredible but it stretched past the mall's closing time. No one kicked us out as such, but I could see the restaurant staff nervously looking at us, probably dreading deciding which of them was going to have to tell us to kindly go the fuck home. Luckily, we left before that happened, leaving a generous tip on the way out as a way of saying "sorry for overstaying our welcome".

As we waited for the ferry to take us back across the river, I saw a bird perched on a tree branch floating down the river. I wished I had my telephoto lens and that it was during the day, because the bird looked like it was surfing.

Tomorrow evening, my sister and I leave Bangkok, headed for Tokyo. I enjoyed today's outing, but I want to see another side of Bangkok besides shopping if I can find the time to do so. There's a cable-stayed bridge farther up the river that I can see from the hotel room. I'd be thrilled to see it close-up. I've never seen a cable-stayed bridge up close before, and it's exactly the kind of thing I would nerd out over.