Quest for a New Phone in Siam
While Siam is the original name for the country of Thailand, it’s now more commonly known as the name of Bangkok’s downtown shopping area. It was here where I stayed at my first hostel on my original backpacking trip in 2017. But this time I was there for another reason: to replace the phone I broke in Ko Tao.
After taking an overnight train from Ao Nang to Bangkok I was back on Rambuttri Alley, the street parallel to the famous Khao San Road. I was having breakfast with the Bolivian guy I met in Ao Nang and three French girls. In stereotypical fashion, the French girls were chain smoking and they were all speaking French the entire time, which I didn’t understand.
Eventually they stopped and apologized for speaking French but I didn’t mind, I thought it was cool. So they kept on speaking French and I ate my breakfast.
After checking in at Somerest Hostel, my home away from home, I headed out on my quest to buy a new phone. I was successful in my quest, but as you will see things don’t end up going as planned.
The Siam area is home to several massive, air conditioned malls with small, outdoor walkways dividing them. The largest mall is Siam Paragon, with a full-sized, multiplex theater on the top and and an aquarium on the bottom. It’s huge, nearly twice the size of the Toronto Eaton Centre!
Surrounding Siam Paragon are its two sister malls: Siam Center and Siam Discovery, which together have about four hundred stores combined. Next is MBK Center, an eight-storey mall with about two thousand small stores and restaurants. This one is famous for its cheap, trendy clothing and good deals on tech.
I considered buying my phone at MBK but didn’t want to end up getting a knockoff. So I decided to buy my phone at Siam Paragon to make sure I got something authentic that would last until I got home and beyond.
After exposing my old phone to the ocean in Ko Tao, the regular method of using a pin to eject the SIM card was not working. So MBK was the perfect spot to get the SIM card out of my phone. Keep the massive size separating these malls in mind, it becomes important later.
As it turns out, everything inside my old phone was so stuck together with ocean water that the only way to get the SIM card out was to completely remove the display. Even though the phone was toast, this procedure was going to take several hours. This gave me time to go to Siam Paragon, buy my phone, and come back for my SIM card.
So I walked through MBK, Siam Center and Siam Discovery to get back to Siam Paragon — which remember by itself is basically two Toronto Eaton Centres — and found a good electronics store. I was deciding between a Huawei and Nokia phone and there was a sales lady that was helping me out a bit.
I end up going with the Nokia. I go to pay and the lady explains that the phone is eligible for a tourist tax rebate of about forty bucks Canadian! I would just need to show the receipt to customs at the airport. However, since the phone was less than thirty thousand Thai baht, or about twelve hundred dollars Canadian, the refund could only be given in cash.
As anyone who has travelled internationally long-term knows, dealing with transaction fees and foreign exchange fees is really annoying. So my sleep-deprived brain tried to determine the best course of action. My original plan was to put the phone on my debit card and take the transaction fee hit. But now I was going to get this rebate, and I knew I was going to be in Bangkok another night before heading to the airport.
I still don’t know if this was the best course of action, but I decided to pull out the cash for my phone and convert any remaining Thai baht at the airport. This way I would still have money for other shopping and food until the next day, and I’d only be taking the one transaction fee from the ATM.
I leave the electronics store and make my way to where the banks are, which happens to be on the other side of Siam Paragon. So I walk two Eaton Centres to the ATMs and take out the money. Then I walk all the way back to the electronics store and bought my phone.
As I’m about to leave the store, my heart drops as I realize my debit card is not in my wallet. It’s gone.
I’m still not exactly sure what happened. I might have left it at the ATM stall or dropped it on the way back. In Thailand, ATMs give you the cash first and then you get your card back. I might have been so concentrated on making sure the cash was correct that I left without taking my card, and it got sucked back into the machine.
Regardless, I didn’t have it, so I walked two Eaton Centres back to the bank. I checked all the ATM stalls but didn’t see my card. I went into the bank and asked the teller if anyone had returned a card, they said no. I had other cards so I knew I was fine, but I knew I would have to Skype call my bank to sort things out.
Sleep deprived and dealing with the regular stress of making a major purchase, this wasn’t what I needed right now. But I had a phone! So I headed back to the stall in MBK Center to check on the SIM card, but at this point only about two hours had passed. They still weren’t done, and it was going to be at least a couple more hours until they were.
So I had more time to kill. What was I going to do, shop? Under normal circumstances, I don’t like shopping and I don’t like malls. And MBK Center is easily the most intimidating and disorienting mall I’ve ever been in. Its narrow hallways and endless stalls start to feel like they’re repeating themselves after a while. It was making me anxious, so I decided to just start walking.
I must have walked at least thirty thousand steps that day. I walked through all four malls to distract myself until my SIM card was ready. I probably stopped for food, but I didn’t go into any stores, I just kept walking. At one point I walked passed a Gundam statue outside of a Gunpla store. Normally I would’ve gone into such a store but all I could do was snap a photo and keep walking. Sup Barbatos!
Finally, my SIM card was ready. I put it into my new phone and was able to connect to data from my Thai service provider. I started setting up my phone as I normally would. But just when I thought I was up and running again, I ran into another roadblock. Since I have two-factor authentication set up on my Google account, I couldn’t log into my Gmail.
With two-factor authentication, even if you know your password you also need a code from an authentication app. Since my old phone was broken, I couldn’t access the code. If you have an Android phone, you know you need your Google account to do pretty much anything. And I couldn’t prove I was me!
Fortunately, there’s a backup option for situations like this. You can text the authentication code to an alternate phone number, which I had set up to be my mom’s. So I created a new Gmail account on my new phone and used it to email my mom explaining the situation and to reply with the code. The only problem was that it was currently three in the morning in Ontario, so I had to wait until my mom woke up.
Yet again, more time to kill. So I decided to head to the top floor of Siam Paragon and catch a movie at the multiplex. This theatre is easily the nicest I’ve ever been in. They had tons of popcorn flavours you could mix and match however you wanted. The seats were huge, plush, and super comfy. I watched The Shape of Water and had some serious reverse culture shock as I recognized some scenes filmed in Hamilton!
Once the movie was over, my mom had replied with the code. With that last piece, I was back in business. Considering I was more than ok without a phone since Ko Tao, the amount of stress I went through to get another felt ridiculous. But despite my obstacles, I was successful in my quest. And I was alive.
At this point it was dinner time, so I finally left Siam and headed back to my hostel. Once I was back on Rambuttri I grabbed some pad thai from my favourite stall and a big Chang from the 7–Eleven. I had earned it.
This would be my last night in Bangkok, and Thailand in general. As I’m writing this, that is still the case. I can’t wait to go back one day, but it was time to visit a new country and start a new adventure.
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