I arrived at my Bangkok hostel at 5:00am. For some crazy reason the hostel is called Khaosan River Inn hostel even though its not on Khaosan rd and its not in a river. I woke up a receptionist called 'herro' who was fast asleep on the floor with the rest of his family right by the main entrance. They were very friendly and gave me the full tour of the 3 room hostel.
I took a 3 hour power nap and when I woke up I bumped into a British backpacker who was just checking in. His name is Luke Stratford and he's from Kent. Apparently Kent is not the same place as 'old Kent rd' from monopoly - don't worry, I asked. We decided to travel to Chatujak markets together using public transport. The bus was an overcrowded metal tube with 4 wheels crudely stuck to it, but at least it got us there in 1 piece for only 8 Baht.
I had hardly any space in my main bag to buy clothes or souvenirs but I had quite a bit of money, so I decided it was only appropriate to splurge on food. Soooo much phad Thai...
Afterwards we decided to go to Wat Pho to see the reclining Buddha. To save money we took public transport, which included a train and a boat - definitely more enjoyable than a Taxi. It was a 100 Baht entry fee, but it was totally worth it. The golden statue is massive! I think I overheard from a few 5 year olds that it was the biggest Buddha statue in the world.
Amazingly Luke and I weren't sick of each others company yet so we deided to walk to Khao San rd. There I managed to buy a singlet and even more Phad Thai. We then went to a pub and ended up making friends with an attractive girl from the Czech republic called Hanah. Over the course of many beers (not Chang beers, thank God) we got to make friends with a few more people; Sarah and Cassia. Sarah was a black German girl with an American accent and Cassia was just Brazilian. They were a lot of fun. Towards the end Cassia and I were quite drunk and decided to make a feast out of deep fried scorpians, maggots and cockroaches that were being sold from a cart right next to us. The local who sold us the insects was undoubtably in shock because all other tourists only ever have 1 insect as a novelty thing, yet without question or pause we made a full blown meal out of what was on offer. Just for the record; scorpian tastes like salty duck and chicken, the cockroach tastes gooey and salty, and the maggots taste like expired potato chips.
Oh yeah, we also ran into 2 really cool south Korean guys at the pub. They were surprisingly extraverted and showed us this really cool drinking game called 'appartment'. So much fun.
By the end of the night Luke and I were quite drunk so we thought it would be a good idea to share a motorbike home. It was 5:00am at this time so the roads were quite empty. This caused our driver to accelerate to speeds of 70km/hour. A really scary thing when you're dipping in and out of consciousness without any protection whatsoever. Our crazy driver just shouted out the slogan "no police, no problem!" whenever he went through a red light or started riding on the pedestrian walkway. At one point we actually started driving into ongoing traffic to make the journey faster.
It didn't matter how much beer or samsong I'd had that night. When I got back, I was sober as a judge.
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