Papaya Vintage Shop in Bangkok

A Unique Vintage Shop

Papaya Vintage Shop is one of the most amazing places I ever saw in Thailand and I thought I saw quite a bit! It’s supposed to be a shop, but it is more of a vintage museum with extremely rare items scattered around in a humongous organized mess across four floors of narrow passages of crumbling shelves.

It’s a bit far outside Bangkok, but it’s so worth a visit if you happen to be a collector of items from the sixties and seventies. You will feel like a kid in a Santa Claus workshop and you will be taken away from your childhood. You might wander for hours in search of an item that will ‘talk’ to you, and soon realize that you entirely forgot what you were actually looking for and you are just having fun!

Thoughts will cross your mind “Oh, my dad had one of those bright orange plastic kitsch TVs, and “I used to waste all my pocket money on that pinball!” “Hey isn’t it the cabin of that rocket in a cheap science fiction”?

My favourite was the full set of full-size superheroes and I really wanted to bring a trio of Ultraman to stand behind my desk. Listing the items would be endless and impossible, furniture is unique, some in good shape and some need repair, but real lovers will know what to do.

Plenty of toys and figurines might look very familiar and there is an amazing range of operating lights hanging from the ceiling… would be nice above my dining table. Lots of strange-looking electronic devices seem to come right out of an old Frankenstein or science fiction movie or a, you know, the one where you always wondered what all the lights and buttons were actually doing.

And then, after hours of walking in the labyrinth of treasures and discarded and broken creepy mannequins, here is it, the chair you have waited for stretching its arms in your direction: “You found me, take me home!” and you will run with you heart beating to the guy sitting downstairs and you will show the photo you wisely shot with your mobile because you might not be even sure you would find it back anyway. ‘How much for this chair?’ you ask. ‘This one is not for sale’… what the???

So what is going on with this shop? is it a shop or is it a museum? Well, it’s a bit of both, the place has become so famous for its colossal amount of vintage objects, that it has become a very popular place for magazine photo shoots and music videos. Therefore selling some of the popular items would deplete your main attractions. Tricky! The top floor even has a room dedicated to photo sessions and video shooting.

Anyway, it is not even cheap, so if you happen to have a car, just go for the fun of it, taking photos for pleasure is allowed. I will go back…