Home›Blog›How to meet people in Bangkok when you're travelling alone
How to meet people in Bangkok when you're travelling alone
The first thing you learn eating alone in Bangkok is that the food is not designed for you. Thai dishes come to the middle of the table to be shared. A table of four orders six things and tries all of them; a table of one orders one thing and looks at the menu with regret.
That is not a complaint. It is the single best argument this city offers for finding someone to eat with, and unlike most arguments, it works on everyone.
Bangkok runs on hours, not days
It is thirty-three degrees most of the year and the heat is not a background detail. A plan at two in the afternoon is a plan to be miserable together. The city's real hours are before nine in the morning and after five in the evening, and the plans that fill are the ones that respect that.
Mornings: Lumphini Park from six, when the runners, the tai chi groups and the monitor lizards are all out at once, and Benjakitti Forest Park next door, with its wooden skywalk over the wetland, which has become the running loop of choice. Evenings: Yaowarat, Chinatown's main road, which turns into a line of food stalls after dark. Walk it with three people and you can eat from eight stalls.
Between May and October there is a downpour most afternoons. It lasts an hour. Nobody cancels; they wait under an awning and carry on.
The neighbourhoods where tables are close together
Rambuttri is the quieter street around the corner from Khao San Road, and its cafés put tables close enough that conversations spill over. It is the easiest place in Bangkok to end up at a table you did not start at. Ari, a few BTS stops north, is where locals do the same thing in cafés that are less about backpacks. Thonglor and Ekkamai on Sukhumvit are the bar streets, pricier and later. Talat Noi, the old riverside quarter next to Chinatown, is for walking and for finding the one café that has become everyone's living room this month.
Do something with a start time
Bangkok has an unusual number of activities that come with a group built in. A half-day cooking class is the classic: you arrive knowing nobody and leave with a shared lunch and four phone numbers. Drop-in Muay Thai classes at gyms around the city do the same thing with more sweat. Chatuchak Weekend Market, Saturday and Sunday from the Mo Chit BTS, is best walked with company because it is too big to do alone with any dignity.
The cheapest plan in the city is the Chao Phraya Express boat, the orange-flag one, from Sathorn pier up the river. Ride it to Wat Arun for sunset, get off, eat. That is an evening, and it costs almost nothing.
Getting around, and the two scams
Use the BTS and MRT when you can. For cars, use the Grab app: the price is fixed before you get in, which removes the whole negotiation. If you take a metered taxi, the meter goes on before the car moves, or you get out.
There are two scripts every visitor hears. One is a friendly stranger near a temple telling you it is closed today and offering to take you somewhere else. It is not closed. The other is a tuk-tuk driver offering a tour for almost nothing, which ends at a tailor or a gem shop. Both are polite and both are a no. Everything else in Bangkok is as safe as any big city, with the usual rules: first meeting in public, watch your drink, take a Grab home. The safety page has the rest.
Where MeetMap fits
MeetMap is a map of small plans happening soon near you. Each pin is a plan with a time, a place and the number of seats left; take a seat and you are in the group chat. The plans that work in Bangkok are the ones that already fit the city's hours: "Lumphini run, 6:30", "Yaowarat, eight stalls, 7pm, three seats", "Boat to Wat Arun at 5".
If the map is quiet where you are, post the first one. The dinner problem this post opened with is solved by four people and six dishes, and someone has to be the one to say seven o'clock. Two weeks of doing that is the whole method.
