Here are a few of what I consider to be the best places to blow your money in BKK:
Clothes:
-Chatachuk Weekend Market. We just went here for the first time last week and it is mindblowing. Utterly impossible to see everything, you’ll be exhausted after roaming through the clattering alleys of this huge flea market for just an hour. The Clothing stalls are mainly up front and I was surprised to find some really nice stuff here. In the stalls you can find handmade design t-shirts, dresses, hats, jackets etc. Every style imaginable is on display- punk, hippy, backpacker, mod, hip hop, L.A. sleazeball, hipster vintage kitch, eurotrash, anglophile, goth, whole stores are dedicated to look-alikes of imprints like Hysteric Glamour and BAPE (you’ll find a lot of japanese tourists prowling around there). We even found stalls catering to rarefied subgenres like Thai cowboy and West Coast Gangsta (I have to make a digression into the this one, because it was the best of all- all the kids there were Thai and dressed like L.A. vatos- XXXL white t’s with graphics that somebody drew in prison of Mexican girls with big hair crying, Khakis, fake Chuck Taylors, bandanas, etc. They were listening to The Chronicand invited us to their Lowrider bike party). Get there early (like 7am) and get out before noon, when it gets too hot and crowded.
Siam Square- This is the Harajuku to Bangkok’s low-rent Tokyo. It’s a mecca for upper middle-class Thai teenagers to come hang out, drink bubble tea and buy trendy clothes. What once were flea market stalls have become open-air (yet air-conditioned… confusing) boutique malls piled up upon one another in the block surrounding the MBK shopping mall and Siam Discovery Center. There are hundreds of little shops side by side running the gamut of every youth culture style of the past 30 years plus certain ones that seem to attempt to rip off the new styles of specific cities like New York or Paris. There is even a free magazine just for little Siam square consumers with the news on store openings and clothings, music reviews and Fruits-like street fashion shots. As for shopping here, it is a bit pricier than the Weekend Market but you can find some very random handmade T-shirts here, and they especially have nice stuff for girls. The skateboard-themed stores have funny stuff like knock-off I Path sneakers and even graphics that mimic the styles of Shepard Fairey, Bigfoot and Kaws. You can also find here (and a surprising number of other places in S.E. Asia) punk-rock flip flops with a picture of Wardy from The Exploited, which I consider to be the sweetest plum.
Sneakers:
At either of the above places or anywhere in Bangkok you can find a billion sneakers- very cheap knock-offs or authentic new sneakers for the same price or more as those back in the States in Europe.
But my secret spot for kicks in Bangkok is acctually hidden in plain sight: it’s on Khaosan Road, at the heart of backpacker territory. There is a dude who goes there every night and dumps out a bag full of used sneakers onto a mat and sells them for variable prices. These are vintage sneakers that he has shipped to him from all over Asia, he cleans and refurbishes them and sells them for around 200-500 baht. There is a lot of garbage but you can usual find jewels: while I was in BKK I picked up a pair of vintage Nike Cortez Velcros from the 80’s in Black and yellow for 10$ US. I could sell them on Ebay to Japanese kids for ten times that! Speaking of Japanese kids, look out for them, they will snake you and buy up everything good. Get there around 8 pm to get the jump on them. Dude sets up on the left side near the 7 11 on the end of Khaosan furthest from the Temple.
And while you are on Khaosan, check my other dearly held secret there, for…
Music:
The Best place for Bootleg CDs in Bangkok is also on Khaosan, but it’s more of a literal secret. It’s a hidden storeroom that doubles as a wholesale distributer to all the Bootleg CD stalls on Khaosan and in surrounding Bumglamphu. Since bootlegging CDs is technically illegal here, they don’t really want just anybody going in there. To gain entry you can go to one of the stalls nearest to the Temple and beg to see the store, or just walk in. Behind the first booth on the left there is an alley that leads to a bar that is always empty. Walk though the back door of the place, up two flights of stairs, down a corridor that smells like cat pee and through the unmarked door at the back of the hall. Smile and walk in like you own the place. There you will find an air-conditioned, well-ordered mecca to illegal music with a special focus on Hip-Hop, electronic and DJ mixtapes. The CDs are arranged by genre and label, and the label sections are completist- they order every release from labels like Big Dada, Quantuum and Ipecac. The CDs are bit more expensive, something like 100 baht a piece, but you get deals if you buy more than 10, which you should.
Food:
Bangkok is a giant restaurant and there is food everywhere, so I’ll only bother with one suggestion: The MBK Food Court. Bangkok’s biggest mall , near Siam Square, has a food court unlike any other. It’s like a huge collection of street vendors, but with hightened hygiene awareness and signs written in English as well as Thai. Now you can know what those random gizzards you’ve been eating in the soi are called in English! Each stall specializes in and serves only one dish in the Thai repertoire, or one specialized ethnic cuisine. It’s all very affordable and you can go a little crazy there with the funny-money tickets you have to buy at the gates. My special recommendation goes to the Vegetarian stall, which makes incredibly flavourful, spicy Thai specialties like Pad Woon-sen and Muslim Fish Curry out of homemade fake meat and achingly fresh vegetables. MBK has also just added another floor of food, this one very slick, modern and freezing-cold with the air-conditioning. It’s also pricier, apparently aimed at tourists and elitists. Here you get a little credit card at the door and have it scanned for what you want. Then a kid with a uniform like a back-up dancer in a Beyonce video carries your tray to a table. I’m not sure what the appeal of all this is, since the food is just as good and cheaper upstairs. I guess you can get pizza and steak or something here, which some might appreciate. I’ll stick to the 6th floor food court.
Afterwards you can head to the other side of the 6th floor where you can get cheap electronics, computer software and bootleg DVDs. You can get a copy of Ableton Live 6.0, the complete Studio Ghibli boxed set and a USB Flash Drive for the price of dinner at Red Lobster. Then, if you are still here in 6 months like me, we can commiserate and be desperately broke together over 10 baht pad thai!
