Bangkok 2026

Bangkok 2026. We stopped here for 24 hours on the way to Sài Gòn. It was partly for me to decompress, for my son to revisit Bangkok. We checked in the hotel, had a rest, then got down to the river side. The smell of the river, according to the son, “just like Vietnam”, before we saw the river. Some consultation with Claude suggested a ferry trip. We did it, gladly, from River City to IconSiam.

IconSiam was such a new concept that suited Thai newly minted middle class so well. Six floors of restaurants, a whole hall of air conditioned street food, one could not expect more. Unashamed street food: grills, fish balls, desserts. The big malls in Sài Gòn are yet to have that. In Sài Gòn centre, it was all about Japanese, Italian, Spanish. No confidence in the real Vietnamese street food at all. Give it another five years, though. I stepped in a mall with Louis Vuitton in Sài Gòn, and the feeling was actually: I was not supposed to be there. In Bangkok, perhaps things are different: people who can buy LV are people who like fish balls as well as pizza.

And the food was affordable, like everything else in Bangkok, from public transport, upscale hotels, tuktuk rides, coconut water. And the food was well made, unsurprisingly given how Thai people like to eat out. The Thai milk tea might shock some with the amount of condensed milk and concentrated black tea used, not me though.

Then a ferry back to River City, a tuktuk ride to Chinatown, to see the real street food. We were not too adventurous, so just walked along the Yaowarat admiring people eating local delicacies. I still flinched at the seafood on display, the thinking that: “your biodome needs to acclimatise first”. Ten years ago, I saw people eating out closer to midnight, a small stall had a large snapper displayed on ice. My first reaction was: where did they get the confidence to source and display a big fish like that, given their small stall? In Sài Gòn, small stalls don’t do big fish. Now on the Yaowarat, the displays were expected. It was lively, unlike the Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur where everyone seemed to believe the good days were over. A ride of tuktuk back to the hotel, again, affordable.

First night in Bangkok impression: it was lively, not because of the tourists, but because it is. The big shopping mall reflected the difference from Kuala Lumpur: much space dedicated to food, and food was more palatable to our tongues. The flight to Bangkok was weird though: the demography was different: lot of single middle-aged white men, unlike flights to Singapore, Hồ Chí Minh City, Kuala Lumpur, whose flyers are mostly families and backpackers.