One year in Thailand: September

Good day and welcome to September

Time has flown! For all of you who are getting ready for back to school/back to real life, good luck in the coming year. Some of you are starting a new chapter, some are finishing the book and some are re-reading the pages. LOL.

Saturday the last day of August Emily and I went in to Bangkok to the MBK shopping mall. We got a taxi to the Ekkamai BTS station then took the BTS (Bangkok SkyTrain) to MBK which was really cool.
What is MBK like? Think Eaton's Centre on steroids, then imagine that bigger. It has seven floors and about a million shops plus a Theatre and a Bowling Alley. Seriously though, it is not like our malls that have shops along the edges, wide open walkways and a few vendors in the middle. Oh no, there are shops down the sides and in the centre and in little maze-like chunks. There are shops where you don't expect shops to be and at one end on one of the floors is a flea market style area with many, many vendors. Believe it or not we didn't find everything we needed in that cornucopia of merchandise. Teacher supplies are virtually no where to be found. I had to place an order on Amazon.com for the manipulatives I need for the class. We ate in the Fifth Food Avenue International food court which was really cool. It has 20 different vendors with food from India, Thailand, China, Vietnam, Western etc. When you go in, you are given a 'credit card' which you give to the counter person when you place your order. They swipe the card and load it with the value of the meal. You can visit as many vendors as you wish then when you leave, you give the cashier the card. She swipes it in her machine which adds everything together and voila! You pay the total.

Sunday we went to our local mall (Fashion Island) for groceries and found a few teacher supplies in one of the bookstores. While we were walking around, we decided to go in to the Toys R Us but it was a very small outlet with only a limited amount of stock. However I took a little walk around KidsWorld just outside of the toy store and you cannot imagine what I found. Are you familiar with the Promenade in Vaughan? I think that is the mall with the amusement park inside. Fashion Island has an amusement park with rides, a climbing castle and bumper boats.

Talk to you soon,
Nicole and Emily

ps enjoy the video and pictures
pps 1 Canadian dollar = 30 Thai baht