Slowing down in a city where you can quite literally feel the energy pulsate around you, is a pretty daunting task but one that I found completely necessary.
You see I’d be planning to go to Thailand for a while now as I had been missing Tom Yum Goong a fair deal and I had all of these ideas on how to spend my time being back. Ideas which included travelling down south to Koh Tao so that I could finally get my PADI open water certification, see Nang Yuan and basically making up for lost time because the last time I went to Koh Tao I pretty much got pneumonia and spent the whole time (minus one afternoon) confined to my hotel room.
But then an amazing opportunity came up and I had to re-evaluate my plans because it was an opportunity that I quite fancied being a part of and due to timings I wouldn’t be able to fit a trip down south in AND do that. So I had a bit of a reshuffle and decided that rather than trying to fit ALL the things into my return trip to Thailand, I would treat it as though I was still living there, by slowing down and making a vow not to rush anywhere. Instead filling my time with all the things I loved about life in Bangkok.
My first day was absolutely hectic as I attended what was arguably the most epic wedding I have ever had the pleasure of being invited too, (Cheers Boss!) and if you’ve read my previous post, you’ll know that day two was all kinds of emotional. But day three? Day three was the day I put ‘slowing down’ in to practice and decided to enjoy the day by filling it with every little un-rushed thing my tastebuds desired, and speaking of tastebuds, my day started as many do… Waking up hungry.
I slept through breakfast (thanks jet lag!) and whilst chowing down on a 7/11 milk flavoured croissant decided to wander into the city for a more substantial bite to eat. Ordinarily I would have hopped onto a motocy to whizz my way through traffic to the MRT station, but seeing as though I was slowing down and stuff, I decided a cruise along the Chao Phraya river was much more suitable.
I ended up disembarking at Central Pier and wandering through Bangrak.
Letting your nose guide you is one of my favourite ways to explore Thailand and I knew exactly where my nose was leading me…
A little street side restaurant serving the most succulent duck dishes.
It was a place I discovered when I took a Bangkok Food Tour and had been keen to go back to ever since.
And then it was time to satisfy my mango sticky rice addiction—something that all these years later is still very real! So much so, that in mere seconds I had practically inhaled it. No shame.
But despite there being no shame, there was definitely bloating and a teeny tiny food baby going on, so I hopped aboard the BTS and ventured into Sukhumvit to do a little shopping and walk it off. Due to my fast paced return to the city, I had completely forgotten that it was my birthday on the day that I landed and so to make it up to myself I decided to buy the lens I had been wanting for two years.
It turns out that wandering in and out of shopping centres meant that the day had absolutely flown by and it wasn’t long before the ol’ stomach was grumbling, so I dipped into a little restaurant and grabbed two of my faves before heading home:
Tom Yum
And Khao Soy!
It’s not often I’ll spend a day shopping as I tend to find the motions tedious and prefer to do so online to get it over with (love clothes, hate queues!), but when you’re jet lagged and mentally drained it turns out that slowing down and taking a shopping day can actually be incredibly therapeutic!
It wasn’t until I got back to the apartment that I realised so many of the trips I have taken this year have been so busy that I haven’t really taken a proper opportunity to completely unwind, and that despite living in a peaceful part of England, a city full of millions of people had managed to give me something that the countryside couldn’t… A day of being completely undisturbed.
