Okay, for the next few weeks this has become a travel blog rather than a sewing blog.  Those of you who are here for the craft may as well click away now, and instead I’ll wave to the family and friends who aren’t usually here for the craft but are currently here for the holiday updates!

Yesterday (Friday) was all about the kids.  It’s hard to decide what to do and see when you are in a major international city with a limited amount of time.  Stella squeezed in a morning swim straight after breakfast, while the rest of us pondered our plan of attack for the day.

We decided to take public transport across to the Siam Paragon. We took a taxi for the short trip to the skytrain station, and once again it did a u-turn across two lanes of moving traffic. I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to that!

Train fares from Thon Buri station to Siam station were only 37 baht per person (one Australian dollar is around 28 baht at the moment). However, taxis are super cheap – the taxi home again from Siam Paragon cost less than 100 baht. For a family of four, metered taxi is a very economical way to travel. The sky train could have taught Melbourne’s public transport system a lesson or two. Air conditioned, no graffiti, comfortable, announcements about each station in more than one language as well as visual representations of where you were, and television screens. The passengers were all on their mobile phones, just the same as at home! And another miracle – people stood up to offer the children seats.

The Siam Paragon was an amazing shopping centre. It started off with a very impressive lobby. As the girls said – this is much nicer than Norflanz.

The first level was full of luxury goods, all the well-known mega-expensive brands that we could never afford to buy. There were also luxury cars, sound systems, and all related items. Once we made it up to the third level we found lower priced department stores and a shop for kids selling Rilakkuma teddy bears. Our hotel has these teddies in our family room, and the kids were rather taken by them. Especially this giant one (that would definitely not fit into our suitcases).

The biggest challenge then became actually finding Kidzania. Once we got there we were very impressed. We’ve never come across a theme park quite like it. It’s all about edutainment – the kids get to be various professions and parental involvement is strictly discouraged. It’s all about the kids interacting and learning and doing jobs to earn money (Kidzos) and then spend it on other activities. The kids got to be newspaper reporters, radio hosts, vets, doctors, firefighters, gas station people, dancers, magicians, cooks, 3G workers, courier deliverers, and models.

The girls also had makeup and nails done, attended university and learned about astronomy and took cooking classes. And that was all that we could fit in over the course of six hours – and there were still at least as many other activities that they didn’t get to, including police, detectives, pilots, lawyers, bankers, life insurance sales, milk factory, burger shop, seven eleven, photographer, sportspeople, builders, etc etc etc. We stayed and watched them have fun for the day, but apparently many parents leave the kids there with synchronised security tags and spend their day shopping while the kids have fun.

Our taxi ride home gave us a good taste of Bangkok traffic jams. Then it was a quick dinner and off to bed, all completely exhausted. Today is our last day in Bangkok – I can see a number of hours in the pool in our future.