Boat rides, glitzy bangkok, and food

STILL NO PHOTOS, cause i'm lazy.

ALright, so its the night of the 9th right now and I'm going to update you all on the happenings of the past few days.

First off, I LOVE BOAT RIDES, I have no clue why, but it's quite an enjoyable sensation to be sitting on the edge of the boat with your feet dangling overboard as it cuts through the deep blue sea at some ridiculous speed. Occasional rough waters creates a spray of salty mist that's just oh so refreshing. Not only that, but looking around you and not seeing a single speck of land on the horizon is just another amazing experience. I wish I had a fisheye lens to capture what it was like on the boat, hopefully my 17mm did a decent enough job.

So yeah, boatride aside, today whilst i was napping in my guesthouse (which costs 7$/night, which is cheap for bangkok, but laos was like 2-3$/night, so i feel like im overpaying) I decided that i'd forgo the tourist route of all the crazy temples and all the history and just try to find what the regular young people of bangkok do. Apparently the answer was to head to Siam Sq. and check out the massive shopping malls they have there that are all connected by skywalks and tubes.

There really is no way to describe these malls except as a HUGE maze like complex of small shops where you can haggle for everything under the comfort of air conditioning. Also it doesn't smell bad and is really clean with shiny floors. It's pretty much like the west, except you can barter for everything. So i ended up spending the bulk of the afternoon just browsing through this place with Paul and Judith from Oxford and I've never seen soooo much in terms of variety of the different kind of tshirt designs you can get here, the amount of ed hardy shirts is crazy.

I think i'll come back here the day before i leave and stock up on a bunch of shirts so i can give you guys. Speaking of which, if you have any souvenir requests, do tell me so I can try my best to pick them up as i go.

Anyways, next door to this MBK mall is Siam Centre, which is just another massive mall catered to the rich, with all the burberry and D&G and other expensive brands stocked up here. They even have maserati, ferrari, lotus and porsche dealers in here. On the bottom floor was a pretty awesome aquarium that had manta rays and sharks which was well worth the kind of expensive entrance fee of 30$.

This brings me to another point, asia is more expensive than i originally imagined. Mostly stemming from the fact that im travelling solo so i can't split room costs. Also, transportation costs stack up quite a bit over the course of the day. I'm looking forward to cambodia and vietnam since theyre likely to be as cheap as Laos.

It's pretty crazy to think im already two and a half weeks into this trip, and that i've met tons and tons of other backpackers. I've really got to get around to posting some photos online or on facebook. I promise ill try and do that tomorrow since i have the day set aside as a resting day.

Food in malls suck by the way, street food is amazing, and mcdonalds in asia will ALWAYS be better than mcdonalds at home, so much more variety and the food is just... better.