Not every weekend plan needs a ticket, a stage or a packed event schedule. This time around, one of Bangkok’s more overlooked green spaces offers the chance to walk among live butterflies for free, while elsewhere the city is filling the weekend with travel stories, photography, experimental art and international food.
The mix moves from a quiet morning in Chatuchak to a creative workshop built around a miniature theatre, with plenty in between for anyone looking to do something different from the usual shopping-centre circuit. Here are five things to do in Bangkok from September 18 to 20.
On this page:
| Event | Date | Location | Highlight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bangkok Butterfly Garden and Insectarium | September 18 to 20 | Wachirabenchathat Park, Chatuchak | A free escape into a tropical garden filled with live butterflies, plants and educational spaces inside Rot Fai Park. |
| OSOTHO Fair #2 – The Travellers’ Tales | September 18 to 20 | Museum Siam | A travel-themed weekend mixing photography, local food, crafts, workshops, music and stories from around Thailand. |
| The Neighbour’s Palette – Seeing the Neighbourhood Through Colour | September 19 | Slowcombo, Samyan | A creative photography walk encouraging participants to explore Samyan through its colours and overlooked everyday details. |
| Vidéo-mallette Workshop with ARFI | September 19 | Bangkok 1899 | A free experimental workshop using everyday objects, handmade instruments and technology to create audiovisual pieces. |
| One Small World – One Shared World | September 17 to 20 | Quartier Avenue, EmQuartier | Four days of international food, crafts, music and cultural performances, including a special Thailand-France celebration. |
Bangkok Butterfly Garden and Insectarium
Date & Time: Tuesday to Sunday, 8.30am to 4.30pm
Location: Bangkok Butterfly Garden and Insectarium, Wachirabenchathat Park (Rot Fai Park), Chatuchak
Price: Free
Bangkok has its own butterfly garden hidden inside Rot Fai Park, where visitors can walk through a landscaped enclosure with live butterflies moving among tropical plants, flowers and shaded areas. The six-rai site also includes educational spaces looking at insect life cycles, biodiversity and the role different plants play in supporting butterfly populations.
It is an easy place to overlook, especially with Chatuchak Weekend Market nearby, but that is part of the appeal. The atmosphere is much calmer than the surrounding shopping areas, and the garden works equally well for families, casual photographers or anyone looking for an inexpensive few hours outdoors.
Entry is free, and the insectarium opens from 8.30am to 4.30pm from Tuesday to Sunday. It can also be combined with a walk or cycle around the wider Rot Fai Park, which stays open later into the evening.
OSOTHO Fair #2 – The Travellers’ Tales
Date & Time: September 18 to 20, 11am to 8pm
Location: Museum Siam
Price: Free entry
OSOTHO Fair returns to Museum Siam with a weekend built around the stories people collect while travelling through Thailand. The programme mixes food, craft sellers and workshops with music, travel talks, special performances and a rare exhibition of black-and-white photographs showing Thai destinations in earlier decades.
That makes it broader than a conventional travel fair. Visitors can browse local products, make something at one of the workshops or simply sit in on conversations with travellers without needing to be planning their next holiday.
The setting also gives an excuse to spend more time around Museum Siam itself. However, there are a lot more interesting museums nearby for anyone who wants to turn the visit into a longer cultural afternoon.
The Neighbour’s Palette – Seeing the Neighbourhood Through Colour
Date & Time: Saturday, September 19, 10am to 3pm
Location: Slowcombo, Samyan
Price: 590 baht per person
The Neighbour’s Palette takes a familiar Bangkok neighbourhood and gives people a reason to look at it more carefully. Participants head out around Samyan with colour as their guide, either following one particular shade or photographing whatever combinations catch their attention along the way.
The subjects are deliberately ordinary: old brickwork, faded signs, shop doors, tiled floors, parked motorbikes or anything else that normally disappears into the background.
It is less a photography class than an exercise in slowing down and noticing a neighbourhood differently, making it suitable even for people who do not consider themselves serious photographers.
Vidéo-mallette Workshop with ARFI
Date & Time: Saturday, September 19, 12pm to 3pm
Location: Bangkok 1899, 134 Nakhon Sawan Road
Price: Free; registration required, with capacity up to 20 people
A miniature theatre built inside a briefcase becomes the starting point for this unusual workshop led by French artists Jérôme Lopez and Xavier Garcia. Participants use paper cut-outs, found objects and handmade instruments to create image and sound at the same time.
A camera, microphone and live-processing software then turn those simple materials into short audiovisual pieces, either made individually or as part of a collective work. Participants can even bring their own musical instruments if they want to add them to the experiment.
The workshop is free but capped at 20 people, so advance registration is important. No specialist background is required; the focus is on experimenting and seeing what can be made from everyday materials.
One Small World – One Shared World
Date & Time: September 17 to 20, 10am to 10pm
Location: Quartier Avenue, EmQuartier
Price: Free entry
One Small World – One Shared World brings food, crafts, music and performances from different countries together for four days at EmQuartier. Cultural villages, international cuisine and lifestyle products fill the space, with live entertainment and activities changing throughout the festival.
Friday, September 18, has a particularly strong French focus, marking 170 years of diplomatic relations between Thailand and France with a market-style evening of French food, wine, pastries, music and art.
It is the easiest option here to drop into without much planning. Browse for an hour, stay for a performance or make a longer evening of it with dinner, even if the visit carries on beyond the festival.
This weekend works best without trying to pack everything into one day. Spend a morning among butterflies, follow a colour through Samyan, make something strange inside a briefcase or see where a travel story leads next.
The story 5 things to do in Bangkok this weekend (September 18 to 20) as seen on Thaiger News.
