Faces of Bangkok.
A still younger and more telling symbol is the Skytrain itself, known generally as the BTS: Bangkok Transit System. No wonder the hospital is a short stroll away, for all serious service and retail industries cluster, if they can, around this vital artery, to the extent that the centre of today’s Bangkok could be defined as twenty miles long and a half mile wide: it follows the gigantic elevated platform as it twists and turns through the city. Had your eyesight fixed in twenty minutes at Bumrungrad’s Eye Laser Refraction Center and feel like taking a tour? Step on the BTS at Nana (you will be about fifty feet above the famous red-light district of the same name; deaf mutes sell T-shirts from the stalls below).
If you take the On Nut direction you will see the city opening out into some fine new residential districts very popular with Brits and Japanese (you may also change to cut across town on the state-of-the-art underground metro at Asok). At On Nut itself you can enter a magnificent Tesco Lotus from the station without descending to the street (if you prefer Carrefour there is a massive branch just over the road).
But perhaps you are after authentic brand names at a discount (Hong Kong Chinese and Japanese shop here exactly for that reason: the same goods at less than seventy percent of the price at home). Take the train to Central Chitlom, also accessed directly from the Skytrain (you need spend only minutes out of the air conditioning), where the merchandisers have catered to Western tastes in clothes, computers, kitchen appliances and interior design. If it is sartorial excellence you need, all the noblest fashion houses of Tokyo, Milan, Paris, London and New York are represented either at Gaysorn or across the road at Zen which boasts an ice-skating rink on the eighth floor.