My, that's a mighty big Buddha

Bangkok: I arrived at 5 in the morning, bleary-eyed and exhausted from the red-eye flight from Delhi. We were having a reunion of our Cairo posse in the only city we could all agree upon. Mariam came into town that afternoon from Kuwait from a 10 hour flight and we decided, rather than even make a pretense at being skilled adventure travelers, we would spend an afternoon in the comforts of staying in a tourist trap area. As we walked around looking for a place to eat, I could hear the voice of my father in my head on his impressions of Southeast and East Asian cuisine:

“It is disgusting. They eat cat, dog, mouse, snake, monkey. They eat tail, head, foot, tongue, intestine. Disgusting.”

On the other side, my Lonely Planet claimed that Thais think being vegetarian “flies in the face of good sense.” Well, the battle was on, but I clearly lost. Most of the time, I ate whatever bland food they considered to be vegetarian in the restaurants—apparently to Thais, no meat is the equivalent of no flavor. At least there were food stalls everywhere—each touting the kind of mouth-watering food that those of us that find that small hole-in-the-wall gems in our cities can only dream of. My favorite were the tangerine-men—they walked around with small, potted tangerine trees on their cart and squeezed out its fresh juice. There was were the coconuts with fresh juice and soft, pulp on the inside, the mangoes with sticky rice, the papayas with chilli and salt, the fresh corn on the cob. For the meat-eaters, there was every type of meat imaginable chopped into bite-sized morsels and gathered on a stick, cooked on demand on the grille. There were noodles and fresh veggies, curried rice and spicy, tart mango salads with peanuts, chillies, and vinegar. Basically, you walked around Bangkok constantly being hungry—not for lack of food, but because everywhere you turned, there were scintillating aromas, colorful fruits and juices, and happy people munching on good food.

And we did some sight-seeing.

Friday night, Divya and Semil arrived from Singapore and the next day Divya, our guide-extraordinaire, took us through the sites of Bangkok. Our first stop was the Grand Palace, home to the Emerald Buddha. The Grand Palace once housed the royal family, but now is only used for certain ceremonies performed by the king. The Emerald Buddha is in fact a small jade sculpture adorned in a gold throne, and set high on an alter above worshippers. Emerald Buddha is thought to have been originally carved in India, then transported to Siam. Along the way, the plaster chipped off revealing the green underneath, hence the name of Emerald Buddha was born. Through the ages and wars, Emerald Buddha changed hands many times, before finally settling into its home at the Grand Palace.

The Grand Palace is a strange place for those who learned that Buddhism is about forgoing material wealth and simplifying your life (and then there’s the whole being vegetarian aspect as well which the Thais seem to not exactly adapted into their culture and lifestyle). The gold gilded doorways, the bright orange and green tiles, the mirrored walls, don’t exactly inspire a sense of peace so much as disorientation—you’re not sure where to look because there are so many wild colors in every direction.

And finally, there was Wat Pho, the oldest and largest wat in Bangkok. Between the Grand Palace and Wat Pho, we saw Buddha in every imaginable pose: sitting Buddha, standing Buddha, and the world-famous reclining Buddha. This is Buddha’s pose before he ascends into heaven, and you could hear each person enter awe-struck at Buddha’s size and be at a loss to say anything other than “that is one big Buddha.” This Buddha is 46m long, and 15m high, made of brick but covered by gold-leaf.

On Sunday, we visited the Jim Thompson house—a series of traditional Thai buildings that were the home to a revered hero in Thailand. Jim Thompson was born in Delaware, but ended up in Southeast Asia during World War II essentially as a spy. After the war ended, he stayed on in Bangkok and helped to single-handedly revitalize the silk weaving industry in Thailand. He built a house where he collected rare pieces of art, and displayed beautiful pieces throughout the country to bring the arts of the East to world-renown fame. In 1967 he went for a walk in the Malaysian mountains and was never seen again. Six months later, his sister was bludgeoned to death during a bungled robbery attempt in the US, and her son later committed suicide. Conspiracy theories are in no short supply in Thailand regarding Thompson’s death—perhaps he had carried on with his spying and knew who had assassinated the Rama the Eighth of Thailand in 1946, thus opening the way for an authoritarian regime. He could have threatened the Thai government with revealing this information if they didn’t stop hassling him about reclaiming the precious works of art he had accumulated over the years. Other theories say that perhaps he was merely eaten by a tiger or run over by a truck and his body buried there in the jungle. Although, an extensive search of the jungle left no trace that Thompson had either entered or exited.

Thompson is surely dead by now (he was born in 1906), but his legacy in Thailand remains. His home and his work is testament to a unique kind of genius: the person who sees a historical window of opportunity, combined with their own intellectual passion, to make a lasting contribution to a country. And walking around his home, with every detail and design a part of a larger picture—the rich, dark teak floors, the delicately carved wooden panels, the stone statues from hundreds of years of age tastefully displayed in sunken chambers in the wall, the five-color teapots and bowls, the elegant chairs with graceful lines to complement the paneled carving on the tables—I thought of my own apartment—a random collection of IKEA, cheap textiles bought from markets around the world, and whatever was in the 50% off bin at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and wished for that kind of artistic eye that sees how to transform your personal spaces into places of lasting and unified beauty.

On Monday I left—after a weekend of good food, rather forward questions about ping pong balls (you don’t want to know, and if you do know, I would wonder where you’ve been), and beautiful architecture and art I returned home to a new heat—the beginning of the monsoon season in Delhi, and with it the air thick with moisture and pollution foreboding a new era of tortuous weather…

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