Our Bangkok Apartment

Welcome to our new apartment! There has been a lot of interest in what our apartment looks like in Bangkok (even though we know we still need to catch you up on our last three weeks), so let me give you the tour! Just, please, take off your shoes first as this is what Thai people do (very helpful in not tracking in whatever you just stepped in on the street).

We are on the 5th floor (but really it is more like the 10th because of a few floors of parking and businesses) of an 17 floor apartment building that we suspect used to be a hotel. The building is Embassy Suites style (for those of you who have stayed at that hotel chain), meaning the middle of the building is open from the top floor to the lobby floor. This makes the building much brighter. The other fun part is that the elevator is glass so that you can look out (or not look out as Duncan does) and see the rapidly approaching ground.

We have a coveted corner room. This provides us with much more natural light than the other rooms at a bit more of a premium. We knew that this would help save our sanity though, so we gladly coughed up the extra baht. When you enter our front door you are in our living room/kitchen. (It came furnished with what you see.)

Here is our living room (looking from our front door).

Here is our 'kitchen' in the living room. We looked at about 30 or so apartments before finding this keeper and none of them had kitchens as we know them in the US. Part of this is because space in Bangkok is expensive relative to the working wage; because you can fix up a small kitchen by buying a fridge, a kettle, and a small wok with a portable gas/electric burner; and also because there is tons of cheap street food (more on this later). We are renting this fridge for about $11.50 USD/month.

Our bedroom.

And our lovely bathroom! Behind the shower curtain is a shower sprayer with just cold water. If we want hot, we flip a switch in our bedroom, but we haven't needed to flip the switch. That should tell you something about the temperature here. :)

And finally our balcony! This is traditionally where our portable kitchen would go (burner, etc.) but we don't have all those fixings yet. In a later post we'll put up some of the pictures of our view from our windows and in particular the view from the balcony looking down. It's a long drop!

More updates soon. . .

Andrea