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Published: November 2nd 2009
Ella at the Grand Palace
There were these demon-gods holding up a huge golden stupa.Bangkok is the capital of Thailand. It is very Asian. Outside of the tourist center, KhaoSan Rd., and the tourist sites, I don’t see many white faces or hear English. Thailand has its own alphabet that is a curvy script so I can’t read any of the signs either. I think it would be scary to be lost in Bangkok, but luckily I know how to read a map.
May Explores The last couple of days, I’ve gone out by myself with my trusty map and reading glasses on explores. I love it. I love just walking straight down a street that I’ve never seen before. Everything is so crazy and different but fits just right here.
Yesterday I took pictures of some of the things I saw. When I walk around with just me I feel like my whole body is very awake. Almost tingling with awareness. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because there’s so much to be aware of that all my sense are on high alert. It’s different than walking down a street at home where you recognize and don’t need to pay attention to what you see. Everything is foreign
here so I have to process everything… and try to figure out what it is.
Yesterday evening we walked to dinner down a particularly overwhelming street and I held Ella’s hand. Whenever I glanced over at her, she was looking down at the sidewalk right in front of her. Watching out for immediate dangers but not able to take in anything else.
Sidewalks in Bangkok When I walk I have to squeeze through crowded sidewalks. The sidewalks are normal sized but on the street side, there are often carts or stalls set up selling things. On the building side, most of the stores are open right to the street and often the merchandise spills out onto little tables on the sidewalk also. So the pedestrians have to squeeze between the stores and the stalls and the people selling and stopping to browse or buy.
Anything and everything is sold on the sidewalk. Meals: noodle soup with pork balls, grilled fish, papaya salad, chicken and rice, white porridge with various additions floating in it. Clothing of all shapes and sizes: shirts, hankies, underwear, pants, flipflops and sweaters. And snacks: peanuts, cashews, fruit, popcorn, bags of green shiny jello
like fingers, roasted sweet potatoes, corn on the cob, bottled drinks to be poured into plastic bags and sipped with a straw as you walk. Much of what I see is unrecognizable and not particularly appetizing to me but doing a brisk business none the less.
Look at the pictures and then add the sound of traffic and chatter of passers by and the smell of exhaust and strange fish and the feel of hot humidity and sweat and you’ll have maybe what I feel as I explore.
More on Bangkok, by Paul Khao San Rd. What May describes is accurate. Much of Bangkok is fascinatingly Thai. But there’s also this funny tourist world as well, a place called Khao San Rd.
Khao San Rd. is famous as probably the backpacker center of the world. It’s a street a couple of blocks long (surrounded on either side by a couple of blocks more) of everything that a young, grungy, 18-25 year-old might want when coming to Asia for the first time.
And it’s packed - at night literally packed - with what the Thai call “bird-shit foreigners” (because everyone is so grungy and dirty and
Eating Phad Thai
We sometimes ate Phad Thai (Thai fried noodles) on the street - yummy, but sweaty. sloppy). I don’t mean to be negative about these folks - I was one not too long ago, and they’ll all probably end up being high-achieving, responsible folks in Copenhagen or Melbourne or San Francisco or Tel Aviv….
I guess most young people coming to Southeast Asia fly into Bangkok - it’s cheap, and Thailand is easier to manage than all of the countries around it.
And they all come to Khao San Rd, or the area around it. On Khao San Rd. you can find anything you want: fake IDs, fake dreadlocks, fake tattoos, used bookstores, uncountable clever T-shirts, uncountable stalls selling hippie clothes and hippie necklaces, pirated CDs / DVDs / computer programs, Thai street food (phad thai mostly), tourist restaurants selling tame Thai food and Western food, buckets of rum / Coke / Red Bull (or any other mixture you want), cheap beers, tacky souvenirs, McDonald’s / Burger King / Subway / Starbucks…. At night it’s just packed. It’s kind of fun, in a way, like a big party.
All you have to do is walk 2 blocks in either direction to find what May describes. It’s odd, a bit surreal. I like it.
Sights in Bangkok. We’ve done a lot in Bangkok, compared to Ubud (Bali). Ubud was a little town: totally pleasant, but not much to do. Bangkok is a megalopolis, with far too much to ever see in one trip. We’ve hit the highlights, though.
Grand Palace. The Grand Palace is the former palace of the king and queen of Thailand, who are extremely important to the Thai. It’s a wild place of huge golden Buddhist stupas and Thai demon-gods and a kilometer-long painting telling the story of the Ramayana. It also has an emerald Buddha statue that is the holiest Buddha statue in Thailand. We spent a lovely morning there, walking around taking it all, and dripping with sweat. We all enjoyed it.
Wat Po. Wat Po is one of a gazillion temples in Bangkok. (“Wat” means temple.) It has a huge reclining Buddha, which you can sort of get a sense of in some of these pictures. It was large, beyond the reclining Buddha. Lots of stupas decorated with colorful tiles, like huge wedding cakes.
National Museum. The Thai National Museum is excellent, especially for its collection of Buddhist statues. Thai Buddhist statues are elegant
and flowing and sinuous. And it’s neat to see the development of them over time.
Buddhism. It’s interesting to be in a Buddhist country, after being in a Muslim one (Malaysia) and a Hindu island (Bali). Lots of orange-robed monks everywhere.
Today we walked to an amulet market, a street of stalls where there were millions of small Buddhist icons about the size of a small necklace medallion. You buy the one you like best, put it in a little plastic enclosure, and hang it around your neck.
We’ve also seen buckets of food and toiletries covered in plastic wrap - care packages for the monks. And stores full of Buddha statues for temples or houses. And stores full of pictures of monks, or more commonly, the king and queen. On certain streets, there are life-size cutouts for sale of the king and queen, in store after store after store.
Food. We’ve had some adjustments, biologically, to Thai food. Even though we’ve been in Asia for 2 ½ months, there are clearly different bacteria in Thai food than in Malaysia, Singaporean, or Indonesian. So we haven’t yet fully sampled Thai street food.
But it’s interesting:
Earning Good Luck, Wat Po
Jordan and Ella put coins in these buckets at Wat Po to bring Buddhist merit and luck. The street food that we see is either for sale in the area around Khao San Rd (and therefore blanded-down for tourists), or it’s really weird- and odd-looking - more so than Malaysian or Singaporean street food. The Thai food looks more like Padang food in Indonesia, which also looks really weird. We’ll eat it when our stomachs recover, but we haven’t really eaten it yet.
So far we’ve eaten tourist phad thai (a rice noodle dish that they cook on the street everywhere, and dumb down for tourists) and our ever-faithful chicken rice (called khao maan kai in Thai). We’ve also eaten tourist food - fast food, and some delicious falafel and hummus (lots of Israelis here).
Thai chicken rice is very good. Like all the others we’ve had (in Singapore and Malaysia), it’s basically chicken-flavored rice with strips of chicken breast. It doesn’t sound like much, but the rice is so good, and the chicken is so succulent, and they have these vinegar-ginger-chili sauces and these rich-dark-soy-like sauces, and it’s all so good together. They give you cucumbers and a bowl of chicken broth as well, and water to drink. For less than a dollar. The
chicken rice restaurant is a few blocks from Khao San Rd., so we never see other tourists there - it’s nice to get away from that a bit.
We’ll eat more adventurously the Thai street food as our stomachs adjust….
Chaos. We like Bangkok, more than expected. It’s huge, and sometimes the chaos of the streets or the chaos of the market life on the streets overwhelm Jordan and Ella.
The streets are a mess. Many lanes, all full of taxis, tuk-tuks (these 3-wheeled taxi things), cars, modern fancy buses, and these incredibly rat-trappy old buses. Sometimes when you cross the street, you just have to dive out into all the middle of all of it, and cross 4-6 lanes of traffic. It’s not as bad as it sounds, because the traffic is so horrendous that the taxis and buses and tuk-tuks aren’t really moving much. But it’s chaos. Honking, smelly, vrooming, darting around, revving engines.
It’s chaotic too how the sidewalks double as markets. Jordan says it’s enough to make you vegetarian, because in Thailand you see where your food comes from. This morning Jordan and I went for a walk through a fish market,
and a catfish flopped out of it’s flat bowl and onto the street and was flopping about in front of Jordan. She thought it was accosting her. It was a bit too much.
But despite all the chaos, we all like Bangkok a lot.
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Marian
non-member comment
Bangkok reflections
The pictures and summary of Bangkok is most interesting. I'm glad you are taking pictures of street vendors and restaurants as well as the buddhas and other more historical objects!