One Day In Bangkok

December 15, 2024

One day in Bangkok and the world's your oyster....

We were actually in Bangkok for 5 days, but who's counting and...well...you know....the song. :)

Our itinerary for the 5 days, which, when you count a partial travel day on each end, was really 3 full days was 

1) Take francesca to the hospital for her follow up visit for her broken wrist. 

2) Meet Patrick a fellow alumn from my grad school for lunch at his family's Vietnamese restaurant 

3) Enjoy a private guided day tour of Bangkok with highlights including the Grand Palace and Emerald Buddha, Klong Lat Mayom Floating Market, an orchid farm, a sustainable house and tea making workshop and a luxury mall. 

4) Mother-Son and Father-Daughter dates on our last day in Bangkok

Here are some photo highlights of each item on the itinerary. 

Francesca was told by several professioanl contacts that Bumrangrad was the hospital she NEEDED to go to - and after our visit we totally understand why.  It was a super clean, modern and efficient hospital.  The intake process was like checking into a hotel with white glove service and we were never waiting for more than 5 minutes at any part of the process including the x-ray and the visits with the doctor.  

To get to the hospital (and back) from our hotel we took the Klong Sean Seap boat service which was an experience itself!  See my short video below. 

I had found Patrick Assakul in my buisness school's alumi directory and reached out cold to him a few months before our visit to get some advice about traveling to Bangkok with kids.  He was very receptive to my outreach and we traded Facebook follows and started liking eachother's posts.  Then when our arrival in Bangkok came closer Patrick invited us to have lunch with him at his family owned/run Vietnamese restaurant called Le Delat.  

The food was amazing - and a welcome change from all the Thai food we'd been consuming - and the decor and service were top notch.  I would highly recommend this restaurant (either of it's 2 locations) if you find yourself in Bangkok craving something other than the local cuisine. 

We are not big tour people.  We've been on countless tours and most of them leave a lot to be desired.  Often the tour guide is some history buff who thinks every last detail of every shrine, temple or church is super interesting and feels the need to share it with all the tour participants.  And then there are the tour participants, often enough to field two futbol teams, or more.  And lastly - but not leastly - these over priced tours tend to coral you through at least one shop or vendor where they get compensated if you purchase something. 

Add kids to that with short attention spans and it can be a total dud - as was our experience with our tour in Ljubljana, Slovenia.  Therefore, we had mostly been self guiding our tours - led by me - but there is only so much of the history and culture I was going to be able to research so while in Bangkok, we decided to try a different approach.

Someone had recommended a tour company called Your Thai Guide (YTG) that offered custom tours at reasonable prices. When I checked out their website and read the reviews it seemed like the perfect answer for a family like ours who wanted to avoid the large crowd, boring tours, but were on a budget.  YTG charged me $130 for the whole family for the guide and putting the itinerary together which was a collaborative process.

Once we were matched with our guide, Joker, he and I co-created the intinerary based on a few "must see" attractions that I knew from previous trips to Bangkok and his recommendations of more off the beaten path places that would be interesting for young children.

It was great to have complete control over what we saw and how long we stayed at each place, although Joker had paced the program so well we never had to step in to exercise that control.  Below is the note I got from Joker the day before our tour showing the intinerary and costs. 

Joker made a nice video montage of the photos he took on our tour as a keepsake.  So thoughtful of him and it saved me from having to make one myself.  Okay, I still made one..... Mine is on the one on the right.

On our last day in Bangkok Francesca took Ryan for a 1 on 1 Mommy-Son date so I had the day with the girls.  The goal was the Terminal 21 mall for food, shopping (mostly of the window variety) and to see Moana 2, but we stumbled across a couple other fun stops along the way including a pastry shop all decked out for Christmas and a cat cafe called Caturday Cafe where you can eat and play and feed cats that roam around.  All in all a fun Father-Daughters day with my princesses!