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Published: August 7th 2007
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We flew from Kathmandu to Bangkok on Thai Airways on June 13th, sitting in hot pink and purple airplane seats and served coffee out of hot pink tea cups. After a long wait in the immigration line, we stepped into Bangkok’s brand new modern airport, retrieved our bags, walked though the front gates to get a taxi, and realized very suddenly that we had flown to a different planet.
The taxis were purple and blue and hot pink, with air conditioning and leather seats. The roads were freshly paved and devoid of trash. The cars stayed in their lanes when they drove, and used turn signals. The road was lined with shiny angular modern buildings, with a skyline of skyscrapers. There were no cows or half-naked kids in the streets, no trash fires burning in abandoned lots. Women wore stylish and funky clothing, with all sorts of knees and thighs and shoulders and backs bared for all to see. Men were tattooed and pierced. We passed modern malls and 7/11s and department stores and upper class restaurants. We felt almost as shocked by our new surroundings as we had felt upon arriving in India for the first time.
Our
hotel was a short walk from the infamous Kao Sahn road, the horrible and fascinating Bangkok tourist ghetto. We got to our hotel in the evening, and after marveling in stunned wonder over the condition of our hotel room—complete with a comfortable bed with clean sheets, a western toilet with toilet paper actually supplied for free, a satellite television and an electronic key—we stumbled outside into the humid night to find some dinner and check out Kao Sahn. We walked past more hot pink taxis, glittering tuk-tuks, black-light bars and dance clubs with half-naked Thai women calling us to come in, racks and racks of funky T-shirts, piles of $1 high heels, Pad Thai and egg roll stands, street artists, beggars, and of course packs of tourists dressed up in too-short skirts and too-tight tops. By the time we found a street-side restaurant and ordered Tom Yung Kung (spicy shrimp soup) and Pad Thai, we were utterly overwhelmed and neither of us could eat. We sat mutely at dinner trying to block out the insanity swirling around us, and I found myself wishing for the serenity of comfortable India and Nepal, which, after 5 months, had become wonderfully familiar. Now
we felt underdressed and overwhelmed, almost offended by the sexuality of the place (it had been 5 months since we had seen a woman’s knees!), and completely intimidated by the fast-paced and modern nightlife. This, we realized, was a lot like going home to the U.S. would have been, had we gone there after Nepal instead of Thailand. We expected culture shock upon return to the States—it just hadn’t occurred to us that we might be shocked by Bangkok as well.
It took only a day or two to get past our initial reaction, and after a week of exploring and taking in the city, both of us had declared it one of our favorite big cities in the world. Things were quite a bit more sane off of Kao Sahn, but the city retained its fast-paced and modern feel. The public transportation is efficient and easy to figure out (including a fun boat ferry that runs right by our hotel), the food is fantastic, the people are fascinating (their outfits especially!), the architecture is an impressive mixture of modern glass skyscrapers and traditional Thai pavilions, and the local markets and “real” Thai neighborhoods are charming and welcoming. Of
course one week in Bangkok has given us only a slight glimpse of Thailand overall—I have no doubt life is very different outside of the main cities—but Bangkok is certainly teeming with Thais and drips with local pride and culture.
We will be passing through Bangkok a number of times during our six months in Southeast Asia, so we didn’t feel pressed to hit all of the major tourist sites during this first visit. Instead we explored more freely, hopping on local buses and boats and using the BTS skytram (elevated subway) to get from one major spot to another. We wandered through enormous malls full of expensive modern fashions and explored tiny cluttered shops selling funky inexpensive clothes and a variety of fake name-brand bags, watches, sunglasses and T-shirts. We met up with our friend Cary, who we met a year and a half ago in Panama, and who has been living in Thailand for two years. She showed us around a bit, and we got to relax in her house and pretend, for an afternoon, that we were normal grounded people instead of wandering travelers living out of hotel rooms. We went to a dance club on
Kao Sahn road one night with an Australian couple we met, which was packed with dancing Thais and farang (foreigners). We swam in our hotel pool to escape the heat and humidity, and tried out a variety of restaurants near our hotel and around town. I haven’t yet tried a single Thai dish I didn’t like, although a couple of them have been almost too spicy to eat! There is seafood available everywhere for dirt cheap, which is quite a treat. We even had some really good Italian food with an American high school teacher we met at our hotel. He lived in Bangkok for six months in the past, and he showed us the local market near his old apartment, took us to a great restaurant, then offered to introduce us to a couple friends of his. These friends were Thai katois, or “ladyboys”, former men who have had sex-change operations and now dance in katoi bars. We met them in the bar in which they worked and got a fascinating glimpse of what is, in Bangkok, a well-established part of the city’s unique nightlife. The women were happy to talk about their operations and their jobs as dancers,
and happily showed off the uncannily perfect bodies they have created through hormones and surgery. Katois are accepted as a sort of third gender in Bangkok, and not just as dancers: we have seen them working in all sorts of regular jobs, seemingly fully integrated into Bangkok society.
Bangkok, above all, is a very livable city: despite its vast size and population, it feels comfortable and efficient, offers any type of food or entertainment you can imagine, and is easy to maneuver with the help of public transportation and hot pink taxis. It’s unfortunately also very easy to spend money, and we’ve decided to hurry up and move on before we start breaking our budget too badly. We’re heading to the island of Koh Tao for a week to get our SCUBA certification and to get some beach time on Thailand's famous beaches. We’ll be back in Bangkok at the beginning of July, and then we’re off to Myanmar.
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