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Published: June 17th 2004
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Sophie and I
At the restaurant next to the best guesthouse, Suk 11, on Sukhumwit Soi 11. I've been in Bangkok for a week now, and have been having a fabulous time. I met up with a friend, Sophie, straightaway, and we've been eating our way through Bangkok. The food is amazing. We don't know what half the stuff is, but that just makes it all the more fun. We eat at street stalls - $1 a meal, the difference between here and home is extreme - though we did make the mistake one night of going to an Italian restaurant and it was gross. The street vendors seem to understand me when I say in Thai that I'm vegetarian - last night, the woman got me a broth from somewhere else, who knows where, because the broth she was using was meat-based - and there's often a friendly English speaker around who'll help out if needed. Last night, for our first dinner, we ate traditional north-eastern (Isan) food - LOTS of chilis, mint, and something which looked like basil but tasted like aniseed. She had three huge wooden mortar and pestle type bowls and in one, crushed chili, mango, peanuts and tomatoes and added bean shoots; the next was chili, onion, mint, and some unidentifiable green stringy
Thai street food
I'm so glad I don't eat meat... thing; and didn't try the third. We had this with sticky rice, and a plate of the basil/aniseed, uncooked green beans, and huge chunks of raw cabbage. We didn't know how we were meant to eat it, but just kind of ate it all together. And the STARES we got!! It was a very Thai neighbourhood - there are a couple of apartment buildings in the area full of foreigners, but we didn't see any foreigners on the street - and people kept on doing double-takes just on seeing us, and then they couldn't take their eyes off us as we ate this Isan food. It was hilarious. I would love to live in the area, it's so interesting and lively, there's a pretty good jazz club in the area, and there's one great apartment building, but it's full at the moment.
The joy of my life here has been hanging out with Sophie, enjoying the atmosphere with all the street life, and EATING... my tribulations have been apartment hunting, Thai shop assistants in clothing stores and Thai clothes. Apartments in my price range are small, one room with a queen size bed, dresser, cupboard, small bathroom and small
balcony. Sometimes a table. The area I want to live in seems to be popular as most places are full around there 😞 . The area near work is too expensive, and besides, it's near the Patpong area (the red light district). Living near the sex tourists' stomping ground doesn't really attract me (though there's been a few of these nasty characters at the jazz club both times we've been).
As for my other tribulations... I do not fit into Thai clothes. I was kinda expecting not to get into their tops so easily, but I thought I'd be OK with bottoms... and I hadn't expecting not to be able to get into ANY tops. I fit nothing. Nothing fits me. Not even extra-large clothes!! I'll go into a shop and the Thai shop assistant, looks at me, screws up her pretty little nose, laughs and says cheerfully that there's nothing there for me. I've even had a shop assistant take clothes out of my hands and say that it won't fit me! Or if I approach a shop assistant, before I've even had a chance to open my mouth, she says that they have nothing in my size,
point to the extra large clothes, and, laughing, say there's nothing bigger than that. It's hilarious (NOT). So Sophie and I go and buy the one thing we can take pleasure in - FOOD! And I'm going to start shopping in maternity wear shops. Thank god I'm here with Sophie, or else I'd probably go a little crazy. At least I have someone else to laugh and be fat with!
The sex tourists too are everywhere. Sometimes they're fat, disgusting rat-like German men (lots of Germans), sometimes young guys, my age, good-looking... isn't it nice that the desire to exploit women cuts across barriers of age, class, nationality and individual characteristics?
The other night, as Sophie and I were being driven by a tuk-tuk driver to a restaurant, he asked us if, after dinner, we were going to see a ping-pong show...
There's so much though that is curious about Bangkok, I don't think I'll ever lose interest here. The university students wear uniforms! The first year women students wear pleated black skirts and white shoes with their white blouses. After that they can choose what sort of black skirt they wear (and it's often short!) and
shoes. And the boys wear black pants and white shirts.
The streetscape is of course completely different to anything Australian. It often looks really slummy, dilapidated housing, exteriour walls the colour of pollution, the sidewalks all cracked and often more like rubble than pavement, lots of stray dogs and cats. And of course all the street vendors, with their plastic furniture next to the stall for people 'eatng in'. On the street, there's the tuk-tuks, these three-wheeled open-air cabs - if I never take another one of them, I wouldn't cry, as I've developed 'Bangkok cough' (like smoker's cough, only it's due to pollution rather than cigarettes), and the tuk-tuks make me hack up half a lung. Sometimes there's also an elephant on the street.
The wiring, for electricity and cable TV, is a mess. There's tens of wires hanging between the pylons, all tangled up. It looks like a possum's nightmare - running along the wires, it would be very easy to complete the circuit and electrocute oneself. However, the squirrels seem to manage fine. (These squirrels can also be bought from the market in brown paper bags). We went to the weekend market on Sunday and
the pet section there is huge. Lots and lots of puppies, kittens, rabbits, fish. It was actually a bit upsetting, because it was so hot and the animals didn't have water (except the fish). But they did have pet clothes which was hilarious, though bizarre. There's a spaniel at our guest house who has at least three different t-shirts - a soccer t-shirt, a camouflage t-shirt complete with designer rips, and a fluoro orange stripey one.
I start work on Monday, which I'm really looking forward to. I went in to the office yesterday and everyone's lovely. I'll be spending my first three days at a sort of training session run by UNICEF I think, which will be the best introduction to the situation of trafficking in the region, as the major experts in the region will all be speaking there.
xxx
Nina.
PS. We've only seen one elephant on the street. I think they're a rarity in Bangkok because even our tuk-tuk driver seemed excited.
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