Shopping, shopping and a bit more shopping!

We are loving Bangkok! It was the place we were both least looking forward to but we've been having a great time, we fly to Koh Samui tomorrow and our time in the city has just flown by! Friday we decided to beat the heat and go to one of Bangkok's many air- conditioned shopping centres.We got up really early and decided to walk there (it's about an hour away) which was hot work. Air conditioning has never felt so good! The centre itself is absolutley amazing it's just huge you can spend hours on just one level and there are seven, each selling everything you could wish for. It even had a cinema and arcade on the top floor! Aswell as a wealth of restaurants, fast food outlets and coffee shops which was good because as any discerning shopper knows spending money is exhausting! It was quite different from our centres and kind of still follows the asian tradition of market stalls. Everybody has a little section all on one huge floor and you can do a bit of bartering which is a little odd! (If we're not careful we'll find ourselves doing it in tesco's when we get back!) Each floor sells different things and you can walk round and round and still find new places, or stalls that you didn't see before. So we ended up doing it all justice and geting through a few days budget - oops! You seriously can't help it though they have such bargins, but as a wise person once said (probably my mum) it's not a bargin if you don't need it! Anyway we decided we needed everything! After a while our feet and purses were in need of a rest so we spent an hour trying to find the way out and got a tuk-tuk back home.
The next day was Saturday and we had booked a trip, our mini bus was meant to meet us at 7am but was half an hour late (we're used to that by now though!)and off we went. Our first port of call was the war cemetry for all the POW's that died during the Second World War building the death railway. That was quite sad, then we headed to the Jeath Museum which documents the building of the death railway and The Bridge Over The River Kwai and has lots of photos of the horrible conditions the prisoners had to cope with. There was one story, which made me smile, which told of 6 logging elephants who transported the huge sleepers for the tracks. Their Burmese Mahouts died of malaria and nobody could else could get them to work so the poor prisoners had to do it instead! These 6 elephants then basically had the life of riley, getting better food and first dibs on bathing in the river! I suppose you can never get an elephant to do something it doesn't want too!We also got to actually walk over the bridge which was interesting but if you don't like heights or huge gaps I wouldn't recommend it!
Then we headed to a small station in the middle of nowhwere for our train ride through hell fire pass (this was where the POW's had to cut rock by hand) We had to wait a bit for the train so we had an icecream and a chat to some of the people in our group, there were two in particular a guy and a girl each tarvelling alone. We all got on well and kind of stuck together for the rest of the day which was lovely and we had a real giggle swapping travel tales (of course now we're in our fourth country we're seasoned travellers!). The train ride was good and we saw some pretty scenery along the river. The train itself was like travelling back in time, it was all wooden on the inside with benches and the windows were wide open so you could stick you're head out! People walk up and down the train with overflowing trays of pancakes,donuts and tropical fruit! After we got of the train it was time for lunch and we headed to the restaurant. Everyone in our group sat round a big table and the food came "family style" which is typically asian, basically everyone gets a plate of rice and the other dishes get put in the centre of the table, so it involves alot of passing things and chatting!

Shopping, shopping and a bit more shopping!

Bangkok, Thailand