Bangkok - Siam Paragon and Central World Shopping Malls

While I was in Bangkok, my colleague Sukan (the gurl on Dior Tribal) told me many stories.

About a society without middle class, without public healthcare and minimal support for education. Where the rich are very rich and the poor are extremely poor. Where prostitution is debated as a common profession and massage salons are of dubious reputation. She took me to the nice restaurant facing the hotel for some mojitos with a twist and introduced me to the concept of bottle lady a model or good looking woman who is hired by a fashionable bar to induce men (preferably foreign men working in finance) to buy drinks and bottles of alcohol to her and her friends. It is kind of shocking when you look at a city like Bangkok, when you wander around the shopping malls as we are about to do in this post and still... You realize that basic needs are not fulfilled by a system that makes sure we have 9x6m, frames of the king every 100m but takes no responsibility on supplying water to the entire population.

Anyway. Today we will take a stroll around the biggest malls in the new area of Bangkok. There were many temples in my previous posts about this awesome city, so I thought I would balance a bit with this bright new side of things. Still, bear in mind nothing is as perfect as it seems.

It is extremely easy to get to the top shopping malls in Bangkok. Just jump on the skytrain (BTS) and get off at National Stadium, where an elevated promenade connecting one mall with each other starts.



The promenade is quite wide and easy to transit without risk of getting lost.

Sometimes you see the BTS passing by, it is quite cool.

MBK is the first mall you will find, but I was short in time so I continued to Siam Paragon.

Take the tunnel and enter the building, where many stores (like Loft or Coco Ichiban) are actually Japanese. Indeed, the more I travel around Asia, the more I realize the power that Japanese have on their surrounding countries - half of them they have occupied at some point in history, like Taiwan or Korea and the remaining are simply controlled through economic forces.

One interesting part of this - actually, of a majority of malls in Bangkok - is the food court. Here you charge some money in a card and go around the many restaurants to pick something you would like to eat. It is incredibly cheap - much cheaper than going to any of the chain restaurants even if they are in the same building - and equally tasty, so I highly recommend it to you. We were going for dinner to the mall nearby Aloft Hotel in Sukhumvit and the day we tried the food court we were shocked - so cheap, so good.





Yes that lady is a man. Ladyboys are extremely common in Thailand, a country where transgender has been quite natural thing since thousands of years ago.



With full tummy, you can get lost among all the stores in Siam Paragon. Flynow was particularly fun to me, I did not felt extremely attracted by the clothing but it is true... That they layout was kind of fun.

Downstairs in Siam Plaza we have more of market-like stores, some featuring interesting things like the hand painted iPhone cases.

True coffe is worth a mention. While there are many Starbucks copy cats in Asia, this one is very special as it is owned by True, whose core business is to be a mobile phone Operator!



So we keep walking and arrive to Central World which is a fancier, I would say and also quite special thanks to the interior design (those bubbles hanging from the ceiling) and other features, like a prayer room for muslims.






If you ever wondered, this is how Bangkok streets look like in the city center. Many cars, may more motorbikes, tuk tuk, dirty skytrain tracks, fancy stores and temples sprinkled around the corners.




...as these two guys showcase, anytime is good time for a prayer.