An entertaining moment at Bangkok's Fortune Town IT mall
If your camera can’t talk to your computer, you’re lost. So I had to venture out to the Fortune Town IT mall Saturday and buy the vital camera-to-computer USB cable. With two cameras -- 8 megapixel point and shoot and 12 megapixel DSLR, both Canon -- and no communication conduit, I wouldn’t be able to illustrate my blog posts. And my reader(s) would be bored to tears. Yep, important stuff. And I’d see my stats numbers plunge.That’s lesson number 1: Bring all the equipment. Lesson No. 2 is: shop around. I began shooting with the Big One almost as soon as I hit the top of my soi today. Under Asoke BTS station, workers are replacing the horrible sidewalk surface with concrete tiles. The day before my head snapped around when I spotted a female worker, jeans and jean jacket, white hat, slim, trim, short body, all the right bumps, bouncy pony tail peaking out from under the brim of her white sun hat. (So sorry, but more on her pictorially speaking real soon.) I shot from a distance and within half an hour, my battery was down to 35% after constant metering and I still hadn’t made it to my prime destination out at Lat Phrao, north end of the city.
I had to take action. Lesson No. 3. Always carry a spare battery. Maybe even two. So out to Fortune Town at Phra Ram 9 on the MRT subway. Always a pleasure using the Bangkok subway but that’s another blog post. (My promises are mounting . . . oh, oh.)
I checked five shops. I was looking for a Canon LXP-E5 rechargeable Li-Ion battery. Prices went like this (in Thai baht: 31 to the Canadian dollar; 33 to U.S. dollar; 53 to UK pound): 1990, 2220, 1950, 1900. Odd that the cheapest came at the last boutique I checked. So I saved 320 baht. Off-brand copies went for 800 to 890 bt. “Assembled” in China. When you translate baht into dollars, $10 doesn’t sound like much, but 320 baht is four beers. In Canada $10 is bit more than one beer and tip. Get it now!?!?!?
The cable is cheap anyway so bought a shortie for 40 baht; an alternative wire on a reel comes in at 50 baht.
I was feeling pretty proud of myself as an aware consumer. Loud dance music suddenly shook the third floor walkways nearest the southern escalators (Fortune Town is huge and long and the IT mall has five floors, I think). Clerks and customers stopped wheeling and dealing, smiled and bobbed up and down as four coyote dancers proceeded to draw attention to a broadband service. I whipped out the Canon SD850 IS and began shooting. Then took a movie, which I royally screwed up. (And I still haven’t learned to upload video anyway . . .)
Pictures tell the story better:
And last, below, that cascade of colour is a bus, shot from an outdoor cafe at Fortune Town IT Mall. Not uncommon to see buses adorned with all manner of colourful charms to protect against misfortune (hahaha):
