With its rows and rows of stalls selling everything from furniture to clothes, plants, antiques, books, carvings and dried goods, as well as the many little restaurants, this place makes for a great outing whether you want to shop or not. The area is huge and labyrinthine, but that's half the fun. The shopping is great, but bargaining is the name of the game: go in at about a quarter of their stated price. Most stalls start packing up at around 6pm; some stay open much later. Best on Saturday and Sunday, though open Friday evening too.

The newer malls are swankier, but MBK still packs in the people as well as any of them. It gets most interesting in the upper of the seven floors, with all the mobile phone and jewelry shops crowded together ­ some are repair shops and some sell used goods, mostly mobile phones. On the lower floors you'll find a lot of restaurants and clothing stores. MBK remains very popular for all types of shoppers and offers many bargains.

For high-end antiques and very good imitation artifacts, the stores in this fancy, five-storey riverfront shopping complex are the place. As late as the '90s real Angkor artifacts were stolen, snuck out of Cambodia and sold here. The shops are reportedly on the up-and-up now, and most merchandise is high quality, but for the budget shopper it's still worth a look for the few places that sell less expensive items.

Malls rule, and Siam Paragon is the newest and glitziest of them all. Connected to the central Siam Skytrain station, this is an upmarket center with everything from a grocery store and fancy restaurants in the basement and on the ground floor to bookstores and clothing outlets further up. You'll find Victoria's Secret and Piaget, plus cinemas up on the top floor that stay open beyond the stores' closing time of 10pm. Other malls that are smaller but still worth looking out for are Gaysorn Plaza (Intersection Rama I and Ratchadamri roads) and Peninsula Plaza (153 Ratchadamri Road), both down the street, and The Emporium (Sukhumvit Road and Soi 24), just five stops down the Skytrain line.

Patpong Road has been closed every night for more than a decade and in that time a thriving night market has taken hold down the middle of hostess-bar central. Nowadays, with the night stalls spilling out onto Silom Road too, it attracts perhaps as many people as the bars. Clothes, fake watches, carvings, pirated DVDs of the latest movies, and many other items are for sale. As at Chatuchak, it's always good to bargain here.