Home to Bangkok - City of King loving and satisfying shopping experiences

Back in Bangkok, bleary eyed and hungry for a good Green Curry with Fish balls. There is of course the obligatory traffic jam coming back from the Airport. I always wonder what would happen if there were an emergency. How would the emergency vehicles get through the traffic. The emergency lanes are used by the general traffic also, so there is literally nowhere for emergency services vehicles.
My sister has arrived and is at the house after being let in by Jason. The house is intact and is a welcome sight for me who has been in hotels for almost three weeks now. Jason has decided to move out to an apartment with Fohn (his girlfriend). They have been together for around a year and a bit by my count and there has been a lot of travelling and commuting between them while Fohn has been living near her Uni.
I have decided that it is time to buy a laptop. I left my original laptop in Melbourne with Kate, so I need a new one. I drag Julia off to Panthip Plaza to sift through the hundreds of shops in search of the laptop and associated gear. Panthip is six large floors of anything computer related. They sell pirate software and DVDs, computer hardware and accessories. They have things that you wouldn’t even thought to have existed. I am on a mission to find the best deal on a Sony Vaio as they currently make the smallest and lightest laptop around which is a priority in my line of work. I can choose from seven Sony shops, so I work my wasy through them to work out what the best deal is. At the first of seven shops I am greeted by a smiley young female shop assistant. I enquire what the differences are between the 69,000Baht version and the 94,000Baht version. The more expensive one has upgraded ram and a little scroll thing to help you scroll pages. The cheaper one comes with a free 17 inch plug-in plasma screen. The shop assistant informs me that if I buy this one I get a flee Prasma Scleen with my purchase. This sounds pretty hot ! I wonder what the more expensive one comes with? “A pen” my shop assistant friend informs me. “A pen?” I ask. So I buy a cheaper computer and you give me a screen worth maybe 9,000 Baht . I buy an expensive computer and you give me a pen worth maybe 500Baht. Makes no sense. Anyway, despite the free screen offer, I want to find the best deal, so I keep shopping. It becomes apparent that the price will not vary, the point of difference are the free gifts that are included such as the prasma scleen. After visiting six Sony shops I find undoubtedly the best deal. One Laptop, thlee flee bags, a flee set of ealphones, a flee mouse, a flee prasma scleen, flee wileress intelnet for six months, flee extended wallanty and flee flash dlive. The shopping experience in Bangkok seems not to be the price difference but how much crap we can actually give our customers. I am not complaining, considering the last laptop I bought in Melbourne came with nothing. To top it off, as I am leaving, they tell me that if I am leaving Thailand in the next thirty days, then I can claim the VAT refund which is like duty free. How good is that??? Another bonus! I loveshopping in Thailand!
That night, Julia and I are enjoying a pirate DVD on my flee prasma scleen when a loud siren goes past the house. I don’t think a lot of it and put it down to a petty crim being chased. When the third siren goes past, I stop the DVD and decide to have a look at what is going on. The action must be close, because my street leads into a very tight network of lanes and ally-ways known as Soi. The soi maze at the end of my bigger Soi lead to the Chao Phraya river, which therefore means that the action must be between here and the river which is only 500 metres away. When we go into the street we realize that there is a house fire. A huge column of smoke tinged with red flames rises from the soi maze. Jason, Julia and myself bolt over to look. Jason’s new apartment is roughly where the large colemn of smoke is coming from. The apartment block is surrounded by traditional Bangkok wooden houses packed in so closely together that you can usually shake your neighbours hand while you are lying in bed. We round a corner to the street of the apartment block to find that the fire is actually a wooden house next door to the apartment building. It is a fierce fire and flames are leaping as high as seven stories. The fire trucks are pitiful They are utes with some leaky hoses and some very useless looking firemen manning them. The leakiness of the hoses is of little consequence at present as they can’t actually seem to find any water to put into them. There are ahlf clothed firemen running around screaming at each other and by-standers. There are also fireman groupie girls running around yelling at the firemen. It is a complete mess. There are people running from the direction fo the fire with bags of clothes and there are taxia dn motos trying to get into the location of the fire. There are so many bystanders that the mixture of all three are blocking the whole soi.

We decide that it is a good move to get out of the way And then head over to the other side of the canal to have a look and not get in the way. As we are walking out, about another twenty utes, bikes, cars and a truck come screaming down with sirens blaring and lots of useless looking firemen dangling from them. Some of them are taking wrong turns then having to reverse. Some of them aren’t actually fire vehicles, but have sirens so seem to be getting in on the action. The problem would seem pretty clear though, they can’t find any water and there is no way of getting more vehicles to the fire. There are other Sios that reach the fire and as we walk up Samsen Rd, we realize that there are in excess of a hundred vehicles surging their way down the sois to the fire. When we get to the canal, we can see that they are getting pumps set up to pump water onto the fire, but this is about twenty minutes to half an hour after the first truck arrived and the fire is now huge!
The following morning while Jason is out for his morning run he over-hears the locals talking about the fire. Word is that one of the buildings was a guesthouse. A backpacker smoking a joint knocked a candle over which started the fire. Eight houses were destroyed which in this part of the world houses a lot of people. It is sad to hear and frustrating to hear that a foreigner caused it, because it further deteriorates the reputation and image of foreigners in the area. There are unfortunately a lot of losers that come through the area and those of us that are longer term can sometimes struggle to be separated from these people in the local’s eyes.