Here we are, in Bangkok, the first stop in our trip through Thailand! The best way I can think of describing it is this: Bangkok assaults all your senses. Its endless different sights (from the old to the new, from the poorest to the richest, from the most colorful to all shades of grey), its endless variety of smells (some very appealing and some… less so), its 1001 different tastes, its constantly loud noises, and everything you can touch here (from luck-bringing Buddha statues to fried scorpions) – it all belongs to this amazing city.

After spending 4 days in Bangkok, my head is bursting with impressions and it’s hard to organize them in a coherent blog post. I guess that’s typical of Bangkok too: things are seldom organized coherently (at least not in a way that makes obvious sense to us Europeans). And yet, it does seem like there is some hidden order behind the crazy traffic, the loud shouting of shop owners, the hundreds of different kinds of street food of which you can recognize maybe a couple. Because it all works in the end and the locals seem to understand and be able to navigate this chaos.

• Wat Pho: famous for the huge reclining Buddha statue it houses and for having the largest collection of Buddha images in Thailand

• Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and the Grand Palace (the former residence of the Thai king): The most touristic of the temples we visited. We got there 20 minutes before it opened in the morning and there were already more than a hundred people queuing. Nonetheless, it is beautiful and it’s said to be the most sacred temple in Thailand.

• Wat Tepthidaram: We visited it almost by accident, because we happened to walk by it and then we were curious enough to go in. Turned out to be another amazingly beautiful temple, especially since we happened to be there at sunset.

• Wat Sraket (Golden Mount): Sitting on top of a man-made hill, it provides great views over Bangkok, with its contrasting modern and old sides.

Bangkok must be one of the most alive cities that I have ever seen, and so much of that life takes place on the streets: eating on a plastic table in an improvised open-air restaurant, selling things not inside shops but in front of them on the sidewalk, watching TV together with your friends outside the house, putting a blanket directly on the sidewalk and sitting down with your friends there to hang out on a Saturday night, buying drinks from an improvised bar on wheels, containing a few alcohol bottles and a loudspeaker blasting out the latest pop music hits.

Khao San Road, made famous by the book and movie “The Beach”, is often described as the center of the backpacking universe, and it’s also a center of nightlife and entertainment. It’s chockfull of bars, restaurants and massage parlors, and it draws an incredible mix of tourists of all ages, nationalities and income-classes. It’s a pretty crazy place at night, with music bursting out of loudspeakers every 20-30 meters, at volumes that would be forbidden at a rock concert in Switzerland. Street food vendors are everywhere, and they offer everything from innocent ice-cream to less innocent-looking fried scorpions. Massages are offered right on the street, on lounge chairs separated by about 20 cm of space – forget about any kind of calming and quiet experience during the massage, but at least it’s cheap and you don’t need to book ahead.

We spent New Year’s Eve at the big open-air venue at Asiatique, a mall and restaurant complex by the river, known for its fireworks. While we were not overly impressed by the fireworks, the atmosphere was fun and it was interesting to celebrate NYE for once outside, in a T-shirt, together with a few thousand people of all nationalities.

Our exploration of modern Bangkok wouldn’t have been complete without a visit to a rooftop bar. We tried to go to the highest champagne bar in the world, but had to stop one level below it, at another bar, because the champagne bar had a dress code that we didn’t fulfill. Humph. But the view was still amazing and the cocktails lived up to expectations.

Street food in Bangkok is pretty much everything you expect it to be, and more. We didn’t recognize half of the stuff that was being offered. The sellers were everything from teenagers trying to make some money and offering cocktails (consisting of any combination you could create out of their few bottles of alcohol), to grandmothers selling fried cheeseballs (I think), to grill-masters putting skewers of all kinds of meat on their small improvised grills, to whole families working at a stand together and offering a large array of traditional Thai foods.