Another food market worthy of mention is the Or Tor Kor Market (last station, BTS). The market offers up a plethora of barbecued meats, curries, soups, fruit and sweets seven days a week. Make your way over to the right side of the building where there are food court tables and chairs set up to satiate those who can’t wait to take their food home with them. For a late night snack that doesn’t involve the area around backpacker and all-around fake hippie hangout street Khao San Road, check out one of the many stalls beneath the Ratchathewi BTS station. Labelled by locals as ‘eastern Thai cuisine,’ the food here is fresh and full of flavour. Look from side to side and see what the other tables are ordering then follow suit. Cross your fingers for a grilled beef salad – smoked strips of beef tossed in a lime and oil dressing with shallots, mint leaves and a bevy of other herbs.

The papaya salad is ubiquitous at these little eateries, and vendors slice and mix their salads by hand using a large wooden mortar and pestle. Motion that you’d like less or more sweet, sour or salty and they’ll be more than happy to tailor your order. After all, this is what’s expected of people in this food forward city – an element happily unaffected by the recent political turmoil.

A River Runs Through It

If there ever were a city defined by a river, it would be Bangkok. Chao Phraya, or ‘River of Kings’ snakes its way down from the central plains and into the Gulf of Thailand, passing directly though Bangkok, ‘City of Kings.’ A sizable portion of Bangkok’s population uses the river’s transit system, the Chao Phraya Express, to commute from home to work every day, ensuring that this most regal of rivers remains as important to Bangkok today as it did hundreds of years ago.

Visitors shouldn’t be timid about using this surprisingly efficient mode of transportation to get around and do some monument spotting. Traversing the river is a great way to do a bit of fast-paced temple gazing as well. Start at the Oriental Pier and work your way north up the river passing Wat Muang Khae nestled behind high-rise apartment complexes and Wat Arun before getting a full frontal view of the imposing Grand Palace and the Bang Ao Mosque further upriver. The river transit system would have been one of the only usable forms of transit during the spring crisis as much of the BTS system was forcibly shut down. Long-time city residents would have had to reconnect with a river that originally gave the city life all those years ago.