Today was going to be a day of two halves. First a nice easy day, pretty comfortable having a look around the upmarket district. Then in the evening, heading to the party road of Khao San.

We went to the malls owned by the Siam group, which were some of the fancier malls in Bangkok. Turns out they love peanuts, not the legume (it's not a nut; neither are cashews, almonds or Brazil buts), but the popular comic strip, with quite a few exhibitions and stand with the characters on

We decided to have a bit of a nicer lunch, and there is a particularly highly rated buffet at the Intercontinental. So we walked through the various malls (rather than the heat outside) to the buffet. I think when we got there, it was clear they didn't want us there. Not exactly friendly or welcoming. They told us the prices, which was pretty steep at 899 (£25), but as we found out some places in Bangkok don't include the 7% VAT and the 10% compulsory service charge. We thought though that this was OK, we knew it was going to be expensive. So as we were being shown to our seats, the hostess casually dropped in that the buffet would be closing in 40 minutes. This was definitely not enough time, need to get out monies worth, so we tried to find somewhere else. 

We've discovered that in the kind of heat we're having, your body focuses on cooling you down rather than telling you you're hungry. So we've stopped feeling hungry most of the time. The problem with that is although you don't feel hungry, you very much still are. At this point, it was about 3:30 and we were both a little frayed by the heat and hunger so just decided to head to a food court and get something. We came across a restaurant that seemed to actually fit everything. A cook-your-own-food hot pot buffet. Excellent. How it works is you get a pan of water (broth supposedly) on the table, which has a hob on it. You then order your meat/fish, veg's and carbs and cook it in the pan. So we ordered a couple of iced coffees and got straight down to it. 

Unfortunately, it all kind of fell flat. There wasn't any seasoning in the broth, so all you were getting was boiled slices of meat. On top of that, the iced coffees were so sweet, I think they must've been at least 148% sugar. Very disappointing. We consoled ourselves with a Godiva ice cream and headed back to the hostel.



Later that evening we made our way to Khao San road. From our research this was the backpackers central hub and party central, so we were intrigued to say the least. You could definitely tell this was where the tourists were. Every five steps someone would try and get us to enter their generic club / bar rather than the others. Here is where we saw the first sign of the stereotypical weird foods in Thailand: spiders, scorpions and what not. They also charged for photos of said food, and I wonder how much of their profit was the pictures rather than actually eating those things. They didn't even look seasoned (#firstworldproblems). Also what turned out to be a big thing, which we weren't aware of, was people selling laughing gas. Every other street vendor would be selling them. Interesting way to finish your pork and rice.

Given we planned to have a couple beers we thought food was in order, away from the less than attractive things we saw on Khao San, so we headed to a little restaurant, which has great reviews, called My Friends Pad Thai. Great little place a few roads from Khao San (you could still hear the bass, but now it no longer shook my ribs). Chef was cooking out on the streets and we got to watch overly dramatic Thai Eastenders with a big fan blowing cool air on us, score. Both ordered Pad Thai (obviously) and it was very good, one of the best food vendors we've had so far, definitely in contention with the duck broth-ocary. We also had the pleasure of eaves-dropping on a couple of travellers in the restaurant, who clearly thought they were going to hook up, but the conversation just dried up as they clearly realised how boring each other was. 

After our fill, we thought we would try the road next to Khao San. It looked like some of the party scene had spilled over, but looked a little more authentic, local and less full-of-knobheads. After a short walk through assessing the various bars, we stopped in Fu Bar, a reasonable sized place with live music and a balcony floor upstairs where you could look down on the action. It was brilliant. Clearly a place for Thai people to come, as i think we were the only white people there. The drinks were good, not too expensive and the band were great. Top evening all round.