bangkok, december 22-23

We flew back to Bangkok, eager to see the new hotel called Reflections that Madhavi had just discovered and booked the day before. We arrived and were totally enamored by this place. It is a super hip kaleidoscopically funky pink oasis of 30 totally unique rooms, each with its own bizarre theme. We chose Bohemian Rhapsody for our first night. See the picture to the right and others.

We headed out to casually discover this new neighborhood, which surrounded the Ari Sky Train stop. It was middle class with endless street food and a couple nice alleys where we met shopkeepers who were so nice – they kept giving us oranges and offering us their stool seats. We went to Siam Square, where we exited the L-train into a super-high-end mall that was as depressing in Thailand as it would be in the U.S.. Got out of there quick, eventually saw Jim Thompson’s House.
Mr. Thompson was an American who settled in Thailand after WWII, discovered the small native Thai silk industry and made it world-famous, before disappearing mysteriously in Malaysia in 1967; he is the country’s most famous “farang”, which means foreigner, and his house is now a museum. The most interesting thing we saw there was a multimedia contemporary art exhibit created by a local Thai-Indian artist celebrating Mr. Thompson’s 100th birthday. The main event was a large mural of eclectic chaotic Bangkok – it included stoned kids huffing stuff from small bags, a guy diving into a moving bus totally naked with his entire lower half hanging out of the window, all behind a life-size sidewalk lined with life-like garbage.

We wandered around a canal street and saw the life of ordinary working class people, living in tin-roofed homes in tiny rooms, women doing each other’s hair/watching a small TV/preparing skewers for dinner, men gathering in a dim dusty subterranean bar drinking beer and laughing around a rickety wooden table. This was no different from similar scenes we’ve witnessed in other countries on other continents – it’s the way many people, poor not desperately poor, seem to live in cities throughout the world. We walked up a few steps from the canal to the busy city street and were transported ahead 50 years and several social strata. I think we each felt like going back downstairs for a little while longer though.

But the truth is (not trying to be ironic) we didn’t have time because we had plans for dinner at Cy’an in the Metropolitan hotel, a sleek modern cyan blue restaurant headed up by an Australian chef serving mostly Mediterranean-influenced food. We sat on the veranda on another perfectly temperate night, had brightly colored cocktails, and savored a sublime goat cheese tortellini with giant prawns, pine nuts, and raisins, among other delicious dishes, paying literally 100 times what we had paid on other nights for street food. This was non-Thai and unabashedly indulgent, but in the international magnet metropolis of Bangkok it somehow felt OK. I want to randomly say right now that Thais revere their king quite passionately - see one of the pictures in the Thailand link.

The next day we moved into the Graffiti room, which was even more interesting and weird – again, see the pics. We saw the Temple of the Emerald Buddha – see several pictures including the window-like shot in the first Bangkok entry. We shopped for cheap knock-off name-brand jeans at the 8000-shop Chatuchak outdoor market - a truly disorienting experience. We came back to relax at the colorful hotel pool before yet another Thai massage: I don’t quite remember why I asked for more punishment but it was even more aggressive the second time around with the male masseuse squeezing my pain fibers into overdrive while intermittently walking or sitting on various body parts. Madhavi and Srini had better experiences, though.

(As an aside I should say if our experience in Thailand sounds ridiculously touristy and unauthentic, it’s because it was. No two ways about it, even if we tried to veer off that path a few times. But this was the vacation phase, more so than China. India, Iran, and most of the rest will have a different flavor. Not that I’m apologizing - it was great, especially with Srini joining the party.)

Finally Madh and I were off to the airport at midnight for our 2:40AM flight to India. Got there to find out our Air India flight had been re-scheduled for hours later and was delayed hours beyond that – no surprise to you Indians out there. We caught a cab back to the hotel, and the 30-minute ride back was simply classic – it’s best described in person but I’ll try to convey it in words. The driver spoke English pretty well but comprehension was another matter; he also happened to be very friendly and talkative, actually fitting the “I love Farangs” sticker that adorns all the cabs at the airport. “Hello, hello! Welcome to Bangkok! First time in Thailand?” ///”Thank you.
Not really our first time. You see, we’ve been in Thailand for a week and we just came to the airport to leave, but our flight is delayed, so we’re going back to our hotel for only a few hours” ///”OK, OK, where you going in Thailand - Phuket, Chiang Mai, or Bangkok only?” At this point we could have just gone along; it was 1AM and we were exhausted, but we really felt badly that he didn’t understand so we tried again. I sat up in my seat and spoke in slower and intentionally broken English: “No sir, we already in Thailand one week, tonight we come to airport and airplane no going now, airplane late, going in morning, so we wait at hotel…..” /// “Ahhhhhh, OK, OK: so you from America, where she from!?” So for 30 minutes he proceeded to tell us about all the things we should do during our upcoming week in Thailand, much of which of course we had already done. It was splendid, couldn’t script it better.

In the end this was obviously completely our fault. We had a guidebook with maybe 50 useful Thai words but we didn’t bother carrying a Thai-English dictionary, the pathetic Americans that we are. Anyway, the rest of the 26-hour trip to India (supposed to be ~6 hours) will be told next time.