A trip to Phuket: Day 2.5

So the story continues after our foot massage in Jungceylon mall. Our trip was really a rest & relax getaway, so we didn't visit many places but instead went for massages and facials and beaches. :) Our feet revived, we were on our feet again now hunting for food. There were many restaurants and cafes at the mall: Irish, Western, Japanese, Thai, German, you name it. After scouting around high and low, we finally decided to go with Japanese. There was one huge Japanese restaurant at the ground floor called Fuji.

Fuji at Jungceylon Mall, Patong

We decided to go there because we saw many maps that recommended this restaurant as well. The interior was nicely decorated with paintings of bamboo shoots.

Interior of the restaurant

Our table

We ordered the special grilled beef set, sukiyaki beef set and mineral water. Now I know why this place was popular and crowded. The sets were so GOOD! And cheap! Well, reasonably and comparatively cheap. Can you imagine, this was our cheapest meal in Phuket throughout the 3 whole days? The local Thai restaurants were even more expensive than this.

Mineral water

This was what I ordered for myself:

Grilled beef set

The beef pieces were juicy and tender with special marinated sauce inside. You wouldn't have known by just looking at the pictures.

Delicious grilled beef

Saucer ordered the sukiyaki set and the sukiyaki soup/sauce (not the miso soup OK) was AMAZING! I couldn't stop stealing spoonfuls of the soup from his box. *LOL* A tad salty, so it was perfect to go with rice.

Sukiyaki beef set

In total, the bill for this meal was slightly less than RM40 only. I don't think you could get similar quality food with such price in Malaysia. Definitely a must-visit restaurant. I'd definitely go here again if I visit Phuket next time. :)

After filling our tummies, guess what we did? Facials! It was impressive how advanced the people in Phuket were. Inside the mall, there were at least 3 huge facial centres, with state-of-the-art equipment and plenty of facial chairs. I'd never seen such a thing before in Malaysia. There were at least 20 of such chairs within one centre, and each chair had its own steamer and blackhead suction tool. Best of all, the price for a 1-hour facial was dirt cheap, RM30 only. I guess it's all due to economics of scale. With such a large amount of customers to serve, they could afford to sell their services at a cheaper price. Facial is like a mass-produced service Phuket, unlike in Malaysia, where facials are considered a luxury.

One of the facial centres

Did you see the facial chairs inside? That's probably only a quarter of the whole centre. I know what some of you might think, with such cheap price, would they lack in quality? Well, Saucer and I did the facials and both of us still have good skin now. So I guess, the products (which they claimed were from Japan) were not that bad. :)

It was already 4+pm by this time, and we decided to go back to our hotel room to rest after coming out for a whole day. We took another 10 minutes trying to find our bike. Seriously, the number of bikes in the area was just AMAZING! And each one looked the same to me. *LOL*

After reaching our room, I took out the map again to check where to go for the night. There was this street called Bangla Street which was the main attraction point for night spots. It was literally filled with agogo clubs, gay bars, lesbian bars, everything! That was where we decided to go that night. ;)

Armed with our trusty bike, we rode out again at night, hunting for dinner. We actually wanted to have local food, and the brightly lit stalls of Patong Food Park attracted our attention.

Patong food park

There was a stall which sold many types of meat on sticks, like kebab. Some of the meat looked really weird, like they're from some weird animals. Saucer tried one of the sausages there, which the lady BBQed before handing to us. The taste was really weird! It's not like normal sausages at all, even the feeling of biting into it was funny. I do not know how else to describe it, but I'd definitely stay away from that if I were you.

Stall with weird meat

This was the sausage that we had. I know, it looked delicious! Trust me, it's not!

Weird sausage

In the end, we decided to settle for a more decent stall to have dinner. There were about 3 or 4 similar seafood stalls at the food park, but we went to the one which was more crowded. The stall had a fresh selection of seafood to be chosen by customers and cooked according to their requests.

Seafood stall in Patong Food Park

We ordered the following dishes:

Never miss out on tom yam whenever you're in Thailand, was Saucer's mantra. This was our third tom yam soup in 2 days, and I must say, I favoured this the best! In terms of taste, it was more closely matched to Prontip, just a little more spicy.

Seafood tom yam soup - again!

There was this snapper that the waiter recommended to us, because the size was small enough for two persons. We asked them to prepare the fish ala Thai style. The fish was deep fried before the sauce was poured all over it. I'd say not too bad, although one usually can't taste the freshness of the fish after being deep fried.

Snapper in Thai sauce

Not forgetting the cooling and refreshing sweet coconut water to wash the dinner down. :)

Sweet coconut water

After dinner, we asked for directions to go to Bangla Street. With our maps handy, we managed to reach the place easily. The street was really brightly lit, with music coming out from every club and pub around. The night really came alive in Bangla Street!

There were many shops and restaurants which opened late into the night along this street. This picture was taken at a nearby junction. Very similar to Petaling Street.

Petaling Street alike

This was the dress that I bought earlier from the bazaar opposite Jungceylon Mall. Nice or not? :)

My new dress!

This was the famous Bangla Street. Look at the amount of people, on a so-called off-peak season! It makes me cringe at the thought of visiting this place during the peak season. It would be a disaster to just walk through this street!

Bangla Street

One thing that made us feel uncomfortable was the amount of 'stalkers' who followed us around to tempt us to visit their bars/pubs/discos. They would show us a piece of paper with a list of exotic dances or performances, and told us that they'd bring us to watch those for free. I swear we met with these people once every 10 seconds and it was really irritating. Furthermore, they wouldn't tell you where their so-called bar was located at. They're supposed to escort us there. Sounded dodgy to me. But don't worry, as long as you ignore them, they would give up eventually. :)

Discotheque

Even though we're curious to see the famous Thai girl show, we didn't dare to go with just the two of us. But we didn't regret our decision one bit. It was satisfying enough to experience the night life from afar. Maybe next time, we'd go again with a bigger group of people. :)