Half Marathon Race Pack Collection, Siem Reap

We arrived in Siem Reap after a pretty horrible bus journey which I'm bored of blogging about. Pretty sure I'll fly next time. Journey took about 11 hours.

Today I had to go and collect my race pack. Not a very exciting event but something to blog about. It was located at the Marriott Hotel a few kms outside the center of town. Below is a picture of the course map which goes all around the temples of Angkor.

Annoyingly, I'm going to have to rest up so I'm fresh for the run on Sunday so I won't be visiting the temples again until I go to the race on Sunday.

Shopping Malls of Bangkok

We've had a lovely time in Bangkok so far. One thing Bangkok had a lot of is enormous shopping malls. I've no idea how a lot of them survive as lots of them are deserted. 

There is a new one that has opened on the river called Icon Siam, which requires a boat to access. 

It had one of the coolest food areas I've seen. it was made out like old Bangkok and the food areas reflected this.

 

That's all from Bangkok. We've off to Siem Reap tomorrow. Time to focus on the half marathon.

Running in Lumpini Park, Bangkok

As previously stated. I will be running the Angkor Wat Half Marathon at the end of the week. This means i still need to do a few short runs in whilst in Bangkok. Before I came here I did some research and made sure I was staying very close to a place to run. This is Lumphini Park, conveniently located on by the metro and sky-train. 

It was a really nice park and one of the few places to have a proper run in Bangkok. It's 2.5km as a circuit and pretty good for running. There were hundreds of other running the same route at the same time as me. Running is a pretty popular past time in Thailand.

There are also lots of people doing various aerobic classes in the park to music and I saw an enormous lizard!

The park was nice and green and a pleasant find in Bangkok.

 

Around Bangkok

We've spent the past few days looking around Bangkok and generally relaxing. I purposely booked us a hotel close to the sky train and metro to make it easy to get around.

One of the evenings we spent in Chinatown which is quite an experience! 

Below are some more random pictures taken around Bangkok.

 

Bangkok has really grown on me, it was nice to spend some quality time here and get away fro mthe tourist area.

 

Chutuchat Weekend Market, Bangkok

Today we visited the biggest market in Bangkok, Chatchak Weekend Market. I went here when I first traveled in 2011 and always wanted to come back because it was huge with loads of cheap stuff.

 

We needed to get the sky-train to the market but arrived too early so we sat in the park and chilled out for a bit.  

 

As previously said, its a huge market with hundreds and hundreds of stalls. It was reasonably quiet in the morning but got busier in the afternoon.

There was lots of food available. One of the local foods is Mango with sticky rice. Below are pictures of an old lady cutting it up for me.

This place felt a lot more tourist friendly than when I came last time. I'm pretty sure there were no signposts in English in 2011 but now it was very much a tourist place.