Now I know what that expression means. I thought it was just a figure of speech. I didn't realise that you could actually drop from shopping-based exhaustion.
We woke up around 8 and Jess being the good mother that she is took the girls for a swim while I lazed around. We had breakfast at 9 because our concierge had made an appointment at 10 for us with a tailor he recommended. The buffet breakfast here at Pantip Court is good, including all of the things you would expect. It's not spectacular but there is plenty of fresh fruit and an omelette chef so I am happy.
Just before 10am the tailor's van arrived to pick us up. The tailor recommended was called Chinese Tailor and was about a 20 minute ride from the hotel. This is quite close for Bangkok. Twenty minutes in typical Bangkok traffic is just a stone's throw.
Before we arrived at the tailor I had a strategy worked out. We were to tell them that we only wanted a couple of pieces made as a trial as we were looking to establish a relationship with a Bangkok tailor for our frequent visits here. Jess had carried a beautiful linen dress around Europe just for this purpose of copying.
When we arrived at the tailor I told the Indian man serving us my story and he said that was fine, no pressure. Jess took out the dress. He showed it to his tailor and they conferred for a while. He said no problem, come and look at the fabrics while we work out the price. We went and looked at the fabrics and Jess selected a couple that she liked. We sat down again and the man typed in the price into the calculator. 15000 baht. I said 'I think you have an extra zero by mistake'. 'No mistake' he said 'there is a lot of material in this dress'. I couldn't help but laugh, and said 'do you realise that's $500 dollars? That's a lot more than we paid for the original'. He stuck to his line and that was that. No copy.
Jess also had a blouse for copying, again linen and he quoted 1500 baht (about $50).This was still a lot but at least it was less than Jess had paid for the original shirt. We organised for the work to be done and asked the tailor's driver to drop us at our next destination: MBK
MBK is a massive shopping mall in the heart of Bangkok. It has lots of fashion and lots of electronics and more besides. Spread over 8 floors, there are thousands of small shops and stalls. We grabbed some sustenance and tried to work out a plan of attack. Really, the MBK is so vast it's very hard to know where to start.
Because we had only a few ideas about what we wanted to buy we had to look at everything (of course). We knew we wanted a suitcase so we went into the first 50 or so suitcase shops (OK so it was more like 10 but it seemed like 50) and compared models and prices. This is definitely not a fixed price venue so you need to haggle and haggle hard. On the plus side there are many versions of the same shop so it's pretty easy to say 'no thanks I'll try somewhere else' to test out if that really is as low as they will go.
We wanted some shoes for the girls so we went into lots of shoe shops. And so it went on. Without giving you all the gory details we bought lots of stuff and let's just say that the suitcase came in handy...
We had started shopping at lunchtime and when we stopped to look at the time it had gone past 7 o'clock and some of the shops were starting to close. We found the taxi rank but it had a huge crowd of people waiting. Just then a tuk tuk screamed to a halt beside us and offered us to jump in. He was blocking the traffic so there was no time to negotiate or even tell him where we wanted to go. We all squashed in - four of us and a suitcase squashed into a tuk tuk built for two - three at a pinch.
We stopped at the Pantip's restaurant for some mai tais and a supper snack before heading off to bed.
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