Diary Entry Day One - The Start of Our Short Adventure

By Sharon Chew
Photos by Esther Chung and Amanda Sangeetha Thomas

Waiting excitedly to go on board!

At approximately, 12.05pm, Thailand time (which is an hour earlier of Malaysia time), we reached the Suvarnabhumi Airport.

Everyone was tired and hungry due to the long traveling time and not to mention that we were definitely not morning people. Neither did the long queue at the immigrations counters nor the food advertisements playing on the TVs help our rumbling tummies.

Waiting patiently in line while waiting to go through immigration.

 Met with some issues regarding Visas of our fellow travellers, we finally sought out to fill our tummies before embarking on our journey.

The first train ride from the airport are pretty comfortable with plenty of empty seats, which gave us a chance to mingle around, however, what proved to be the challenge was the transit to Phelon Chit, where our hotel was located.

Reaching Paya Thai, we had to transit to a different line and this required us to purchase Rabbit Cards, which either came with both stored value or day trip passes which would allow us to get around during our 9 day trip. 

Counting the tickets for the students.

The train upon its arrival was full and we had to squeeze our way in to the tiny spaces and carrying our huge luggage along did not aid the situation, causing some of us to take the next train.

After squeezing in with our luggage for four stops, we finally reached Phleon Chit stop, where we got off and started lugging our luggage down flights of staircases. After dragging our luggage along the roadsides, across a railway track, we finally turned in to a little alley, where our hotel was located. Walking along the streets of Bangkok on our way to our hotel, we got a little whiff of Bangkok, with the tiny massage centres and laundry shops, which got us all excited to explore Bangkok.

After much lugging and heaving, we finally reached Golden Palace Hotel. A simple and nice, 2-storey hotel, it proved to be a clean and spacious hotel with a nice little pool.

Thai Restaurant that showcases authenticity of Thai cuisine.

Upon checking in, we rested our worn out bodies and got ready for our first session about LGBT issues. We headed to Asok via the Sky Train, which proved to be a challenge again as travelling in a huge crowd in the same train was simply impossible due to the crowd. After finally uniting with the rest at Asok, we headed to a Thai restaurant called Baan Thai Suk to meet our representative. The walk from Asok train station to the restaurant caused many of the shutter bugs amongst our travellers to gape in awe as they paused to take snaps of the beautiful sunset across the skyscrapers and billboard advertisements. As we continued on to Baan Thai Suk, although situated in a dark alley, it turned out to be really authentic with their rather classy ambience and lighting. We were given a private room, where we met our LGBT representative who went on to discuss about the issues facing the LGBT community in Thailand, which turned out to be a rather eye opening talk as we learnt about issues that we never knew about. The Q& A session, followed by the presentation, allowed our eager travellers to satisfy their quench for knowledge about Thailand and its LGBT community. While some of us stayed on to have dinner in the restaurant, others headed out to explore the streets of Bangkok. After all the lugging of the bags and exploring, we are finally back in our hotel rooms, tired, dirty and grumpy but definitely more enlightened and happier. 

Sharon Chew, 23 is a mediocre student who loves food but always forgets to take the food photos. Loves to daydream but never remembers them.