Nothing To Do With Toast

Happy Christmas (Well Nearly!!)
So, We have finally left Thailand and are now in Cambodia. We have just spent the last 4 days in Phnom Pehn (The Capital city - POP 2 million) and only today we got the bus down to Cambodia's only beach area, Which is called Sihanouk Ville, Which is where we will be spending the next 10 days or so trying to remind ourselves its actually Christmas.
wait, wait wait... I'm actually getting ahead of myself here, I have not even told you all about Bangkok, we spent a total of 6 days there and boy was it a shock to our system, We got a boat from Ko Tao to a place called Chumpon (crapy town) on the mainland where we caught an over night train to Bangkok:

When we arrived at the train station in Chumpon, we asked what platform the train is going to be on, the woman just pointed over to a single carriage waiting on the tracks, we hopped on board and waited for the rest of our train, which slammed into us pretty hard as it came into the station about 20 minutes later, it was a pretty boring journey and we arrived into Bangkok feeling pretty rough and just wanting to sleep!!

That's the inside of the train, do you think they could have fitted any more very hard metal things at my head height? Just look at them!! I must have taken my head off about 10 times during the night going to the toilet, Actually while I'm at it, the bloody toilet was about the size of a shoe box, I kept picturing myself getting trapped and having to yelp to be cut out of a smelly metal box with my pants around my ankles. I can just imagine charlies face now.....

Well, we arrived into Bangkok very early (5.30am) and got a taxi to the hostel, It was quite nice seeing the city at that time of the morning as it seemed nice and quite.
The hostel was a fair bit outside of town, but it was an amazing hostel and it was very nice to come back to after a hard days shopping in the city, Here is a few shots of the hostel:

It was brand new and was pretty much an apartment block, so we had our own entrance and or course the amazing pool on the roof

Ive always seen "infinity pools" on cribs and they always looked really cool, but when they look over a massive city and your 6 stories up, they are even better!!

One day we would head into town and shop/look around all day and the next day we would just chill by the pool and relax, It was a great plan!!

At night the view was deadly, the glow from the city was something else!


It was pretty hot in Bangkok and the pollution was crazy. You could just see grey when looking over the city, although sometimes the clouds made it look really cool.

Getting into town was pretty annoying as it was made up of a free taxi transfer from the hostel to the nearest Metro station, then 2 stops down the line, you change over to the sky train (monorail). It was worth it as the hostel was nice, but it really made the days longer. It was really the taxi part that was annoying as we were only going 5-6 miles, but it could take 40 minutes, the metro and sky train were deadly, clean, very fast and cheap!


Coming up from the metro!


Waiting for the sky train, this is actually a fair bit outside of the city centre and its still very built up, Its a huge city!!


This is inside the skytain station, Its only been around for about 2 years, I cant imagine the traffic problems before it!!


That's a skytrain track, its not exactly small. they kinda take over any street they go down and take away alot of the natural light from the street below. There are loads of walkways underneath the actual track which get you up above the fumes from the traffic below, which can be pretty bad!!


They certainly dominate the skyline.


That's taken from the walkways, It can look pretty cool looking down on the traffic.

Bangkok was amazing, I wasn't really looking forward to it, but I was blown away, by its size,by the shops, by the people, everything. We will be coming back through Bangkok in march and I cant wait, we went shopping crazy, bought loads of t-shirts/shorts and stuff for australia, we stuck them in storage in a place downtown which is really handy as we now have smaller bags and it makes it a bit easier to get around.
The day we left Ko Tao, my laptop decided to mess up and wouldn't boot into windows (This may get a bit nerdy, Sorry), I wasn't too worried as I had my photos backed up, and I had a windows CD to reinstall it back onto the laptop, but the cd was badly scratched and it wouldn't work. Starting to panic a little and beginning to think I may have to carry around a useless piece of expensive plastic for a while, that when I got to Bangkok I headed into the city to see If I could find a place that could sort it out for me. I was walking around a big shopping centre when I spotted a shop selling software, But instead of windows costing 300 euros, the shop was selling pirate copies of any type of software for 2 euros!!!!! Sweet, they even had the newest version of windows (out next march everywhere else in the world!!) After spending 10 euros I walked away with roughly 2800 euros worth of dodgy software and a big grin on my face!! I like Bangkok.


It was the first time that we knew it was Christmas, Loads of decorations everywhere which was kinda cool:


Its pretty funky, but It really added to wondering around.


Some of the shopping centres are really cheap, mainly because everything is a fake, really really good fakes, but still fakes, most of the real stuff is made here too so the fakes are spot on. Before I left Ireland I was shopping in Dublin and seen a t-shirt by an American brand for 90 euros (Yup, a 90 euro t-shirt) I laughed at the price then, but when I seen an Identical copy for 4 euros in a shop here, I could not resist, It had all the labels, it even had the tags on it!!


Other shopping centres are the real deal and the prices are the same as back home except for the tax is 7% as apposed to 21% back home. There is every shop you could imagine from Louis Vuiton and Chanel to Nike and Adidas, they even have Ferrari and Lamborghini shops! (they have car showrooms inside shopping centres!!)



Ferrari F430


911 Turbo (997)




Spyker

Here a few shots taken a night time in the city centre.










One thing we did do a few times was go to the cinema! We even went to see an IMAX movie in 3D:



Here is Charlie modelling some very snazzy 3D Glasses! The IMAX movie was savage, everything should be in IMAX, Books should be in IMAX............

Well thats all about our time in Bangkok, All there was to do was to fly to Phnom Pehn, we left from the brand new Bangkok airport:

Its bloody massive and very impressive, thats just one of the entrances to the gates!!


Well I hope your all keeping well and looking forward to Xmas, Have a couple of beers for us, we certainly will be thinking of you lot while we are lying on the beach drinking ours!!

Lots of Love
Sean and Charlie.