Holiday: Bangkok Day 4 - goose shopping and sleeper train

Had a really bad night's sleep last night - not sure why, but couldn't stay asleep.  Was actually pleased when the alarm went off at 9am and we all got up for breakfast.  We had our usual array of all types of food - no mystery fruit today, the last two days I have selected a mystery fruit for us all to guess.  Turns out both were lychees - but very different in looks.  The only fresh fruit available today was boring melon!

We then went back to our room to pack up.  Always a task, surprising how full our suitcases are looking already after just a couple of days!  Matt went down to collect our laundry, as is always hotel laundry prices were outrageous but on the road the hotel was on were two laundrettes who were charging a fraction of the price, so we took our stuff there.  It all came back clean, and neatly tucked (even our knickers).  Money well spent!

Once we had fitted everything in, we checked out, left our bags at the hotel and then went to do some more exploring in the city close to us.  We got the sky train to Siam to investigate the MBK shopping centre which was a recommended explore.  We spent a couple of hours there, having a good explore, there were over 2000 shops, most of which were tiny, but even so the place was enormous and sold pretty much everything you could think of (except chocolate moulds!).  We split up into girl and boys so we all got to see what we wanted.  As I have mentioned, there was a shocking lack of homewares, but never mind.  

There was a huge Japanese shop there: Don Don Donki which was like walking into Japan - it had tones of food, stationery, clothes, homewares, laundry stuff, animé stuff, well pretty much everything - was fun to walk round and reminisce.  

Actually we have all noticed that there is A LOT of Japanese stuff in Bangkok: restaurants, supermarkets, brands etc in fact every other restaurant seems to be Japanese!  Talking of which we had seen signs for Loft and Muji on our way to the MBK centre, so we decided to check them out. 

We spent quite a time in Loft, where Tom fell in love with a giant yellow goose!  He walked away from it but then said he was going to get it...I thought he was joking, he disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned with the giant goose in a bag, he had only gone and done it!  We each have 30kgs of luggage for this trip - but really, a giant goose?!  It's going to be fun taking that with us across Asia!

After the purchase, I found one of those cute Japanese style photo booths, so we piled in with the goose for a laugh.  We now, of course had a giant goose to cart around with us!  We slowly walked back to the skytrain station (via a gift shop that was selling shopping bags from Lancaster and Heysham?!!!!!)

Next stop was Terminal 21 to pick up some snacks for the sleeper train (French bakery products and crisps) and then to @Palm 18 Bar just next door to our hotel for lunch.  We were back to Thai food and decided to do it Thai style (ie place menu items in the middle of the table and everyone help themselves to it.  We had prawns in a tamarind sauce, chicken with Thai herbs and stir fried pineapple rice in a pineapple (of course!).  All very nice.  We then got our bags back, i did a massive repack in Matt's bag to make room for the goose (which only just fitted!), we then loaded them and us onto the hotel's electric tuk tuk, which took us down to the end of the road for us, we then wheeled them to the Metro.  

We got the metro to Bang Sue and then to Krung Thep Aphiwat Central Terminal - a huge massive, and brand new train station which has been future proofed for lots of high speed trains and is currently very empty - hardly any trains and very few shops.  In 10 years time I'm sure it will be bustling!

We boarded dead on time and got settled in our 1st Class accommodation.  Tom and I shared a cabin whilst Matt was next door sharing with an old Thai man.  We had interconnecting doors, so had them open to start with, but the old fellow went straight to bed so we felt we should shut them.

We left dead on time 5.30pm and slowly trundled out of Bangkok, we didn't see much of the city as we left because it was dark, cloudy and raining.  Early doors the guard made up our beds, so we all sat on my bunk, enjoyed our tea and then got ready for bed.

It wasn't a great sleep - think I probably got about an hour in total - and that was in chunks of 10 minutes. The train vibrated, twisted and turned in its tracks, loud station announcements were made when we stopped at them, it jerked every time it started again.  Also the air conditioning was set to quite cold.  It was lovely to lay down for the night but it wasn't restful, but a great experience none the less.