We arrived in Bangkok after a two week stint guiding and providing all of the services for a kosher tour to Vietnam and Cambodia, meaning our working from about 6 a.m. to about 11:00 p.m. every day- and sometimes longer. So, we were not in the mood to run around Bangkok to see all of the must-see sights. In addition, two of the travelers who stayed on for an additional day had gone shopping and we agreed to meet them after our brief few hours of sightseeing. So, we took the train to the Siam Paragon Shopping Center .

Big, large, enormous, huge… all of these terms pale when describing this mall.

If you have been to Franklin Mills in Philadelphia, you’ve been in a mall that is approximately 150,000 square meters.

If you’ve been to Palisades Center in West Nyack, NY, you’ve been in a mall that is 205,996 square meters.

This mall has 500,000 square meters of retail space.

And it is definitely upscale! Every well-known designer shop I could think of is there.

And it is spotlessly clean and beautiful!

There were stores selling Maseratis and Ferraris and stores selling electronic equipment– huge selections and huge quantities. We walked into one department store that was close to the size a mall itself. the housewares department was a dream! We saw Corelle patterns that I’d never seen before (of course I’m not sure that we have all of the latest patterns here in Israel.)

We liked this flatware:

After walking and walking and seeing a lot, but not nearly all of what the mall had to offer, we went back to the hotel to rest and then we went out to the might market.

It seemed that most of what they were selling was the same merchandise we had seen in Vietnam and Cambodia except that the prices were higher. But we wanted to get back early because we were going on to the next part of our adventure in the morning!

(The picture above was an advertisement!)