Custom Clothing and More Shopping

Jeff oversees our dinner
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Today we start a multi day adventure of getting clothes made at the tailor. Bangkok (as well as the rest of Thailand) is full of tailors that will make you anything that you want. It seems that (in Bangkok at least) most of the tailors send their stuff to the same places to be made. This means that the important things in choosing which tailor you want are their fabric selections and measuring abilities. We decided to go to Crown Tailors because it was near our hotel (only one SkyTrain stop) and it gets good reviews.

View from the SkyTrain platform of some sort of Buddhist celebration
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Today we spent a few hours there picking out fabric and deciding exactly what we wanted to have made. Then we were both measured. It takes a lot of measurements to create clothes from scratch! In the end, Jeff decided on two suits, a pair of pants, two long sleeve shirts, and two short sleeve shirts. I went with two pairs of pants and four Thai silk blouses. The total cost was not far over $1000 USD. That isn't a small sum, but for all the clothes we got, its not a lot! All the clothing (except my shirts) are from a cashmere/wool mix that feels very nice. If you are going to go to a Tailor, it is best to figure out everything that you want all at once, because you do get a volume discount. The other tricky thing with picking a tailor is that not all of them do women's clothing. You see in the coming days, that having clothes made is a time consuming endeavor. If we had both used different tailors, I think it would have been way more complicated and taken way more time than we wanted to devote to it.

Afterwards, we headed back to the big Central World Market for dinner. We ate a cool Japanese restaurant called Aka. You order meat and then you cook it yourself on a grill in the center of your table. The meat is cut very thin and cooks very quickly. It was very tasty! Most of the staff there didn't speak much English, so when we had some questions about the menu, it took them a few minutes to find someone to answer them. The food was very good and it was fun to cook it yourself.

After dining we wandered through the mall for quite a while looking at different stores. I was sad to see that the Toys R Us looked just like one in the USA. I was hoping to find some unique things to buy as gifts. I guess it makes sense though since it is a US store. Once we were tired of walking around, we hopped on the SkyTrain and made it back in time to catch the shuttle to the hotel.

One of the great features of the SkyTrain is that it isn't just the platforms for boarding that are elevated. They have long elevated walkways that go into different stores or at least take you further down the road before you exit. The sidewalks are jammed with street vendors (and the occasional motorcycle) so being able to avoid them from the elevated walkway is great. Central World can be accessed from the SkyTrain, so you can exit the SkyTrain and make it into the mall without ever having to walk on the sidewalk.