Bangkok Day 2

Sunday Sept 26, 2004

The morning was a bit of a shock as Bill, Marian and I passed some opulent shopping centers and walked into a Starbucks almost exactly like the ones I’ve seen in the states. Unfortunately the Starbucks prices were also on par with ones in the states, which relative to other expenses there makes it a fairly upscale place.

Bill in Siam Discovery Center Starbucks

The very modern-looking Sky Train puts Seattle to shame. I had a preconception about Bangkok and that was shattered in the first 15 minutes that morning. So my immersion into the poor, backward Southeast Asian area was starting gradually, I guess.

Bill and I in Bangkok . You can see part of the Sky Train rail in the background.

A better shot of the Sky Train.

On the other hand, there are some things about Bangkok that are markedly backward compared to western cities. Like the air pollution. I’ve been to LA a couple times, and the pollution there was bad, but Bangkok air pollution is on another level. A couple of times my throat was burning, and it seemed like the sky was overcast until I paid a little more attention and noticed that is was pollution, not cloud cover. I could barely see the sun through the smog. That was a mixed blessing though since it was extremely hot (upper 90’s I guess) and so being in the sun would have been too much without it’s diminution by the smog.

Speaking of hot; it was. I’m not used to those temperatures, and walking around doing the tourist thing was somewhat uncomfortable at first. I don’t remember being bothered by it much after the first few days, so I guess I got used to it some.

Another thing I noticed there was the noise. Evidently there are no muffler laws, so the average vehicle on the road is missing its muffler, or something. A tuk tuk will drive down a residential street at 5 AM with no muffler and apparently not think anything of it. (A tuk tuk is a small 3-wheel vehicle – I managed to not get a picture of one but here’s a link to Into Asia’s picture.) Apparently the culture doesn’t have the concept of noise pollution, or it’s just understood that lots of people don’t have the money to spend on muffler maintenance.

Bangkok and all the places I went on this trip have a much higher percentage of motos (motorbikes, scooters) than anywhere else I’ve been. And if I lived there I’d get one too. They move through traffic much more easily than cars; since they don’t obey any traffic laws they live up to their full potential for squeezing between cars, passing on the outside, inside, or anywhere else there’s a momentary foot-wide gap. It’s pretty amazing to see, and it’s clear how with all those people in Bangkok they still manage to travel around: opportunism and guts. I read a story recently saying that the dramatically better traffic flow in some foreign city was due to the aggressiveness of the drivers, and it’s clear to me Bangkok has the same thing going for it. I’m surprised that I didn’t see a single accident while I was there. I don’t know what the accident stats are but if you put a bunch of Seattleites on motos in Bangkok they’d all be dead in 15 minutes. Though I should point out that they aren’t typically driving recklessly fast, in fact it appeared to me that they were driving fairly slowly. I guess that compensates for the chaotic mesh of routes they’re all driving.

After coffee we walked over to MBK (Mah Boon Krong) Center, a mall typical of what I’ve seen in the US . To both my pride and embarrassment, Bill took another step towards his goal of having “the most obnoxious cell-phone in Asia” by buying a Hello Kitty bell dangly for his phone. So add that to the translucent case and the 15 or 20 garish LEDs that flash at various times, and it’s pretty hard for me to imagine a more obnoxious phone. Though come to think of it there were some bright yellow furry cell phone covers there that he could get.

Next we went to Cabbages and Condoms for lunch. It’s a restaurant maybe owned (I don’t remember the relationship) by a man who sounds like the father of condom use in Southeast Asia. He was apparently the first person to aggressively lobby for condom use there. He educated people about them and tried to make them “as available as cabbages” to the people. Hence the restaurant name. The food was great, I had Phad Thai and I decided that many of the Thai restaurants I’ve eaten at in Seattle are very authentic, as opposed to Mexican restaurants. The Thai restaurants I like in the Seattle area evidently haven’t “Americanized” their recipes much, which seems good.

For dinner that night Bill and I ate at a street vendor close to the A-One Inn. That street vendor can pack his whole restaurant on his cart. He’s got a bunch of stackable plastic chairs and tables, and his cooking setup. I was a little worried about the obvious hygiene problems with his setup, but decided not to worry about it, and as I said before I had no problems the whole trip. I think the only difference between that street vendor setup and lots of restaurants in the US is that the cook is right there where you see what’s going on.

On the way back to our room we happened to walk through the Sky Train station by the National Stadium. There was a women’s Mui Thai competition going on, with a ring setup, 3 or 4 television cameras, and a bunch of international flags.

Mui Thai at National Stadium.

It looked like a fairly major competition, what with the cameras, international flags, and international competitors. However there weren’t actually that many spectators, and some of the competitors didn’t look that great, so I’m not sure how important the competition was. Granted if you compare women’s boxing to men’s the women are much slower and less powerful, but some of these women fighting were radically worse than others, so maybe it wasn’t that major a competition, or was a preliminary round in a big tournament. There was a western woman there, a Canadian, and she kicked ass. Most of the women had some kind of ritualized warm-up routine that they did in the ring, one went for maybe 5 minutes while her competitor sat there and watched. Pretty strange, seems like they need a time limit on that. Anyway the woman with the longest warm-up routine always won. Bill noted that people who are into Sumo wrestling say they can always see who will win the match by the pre-match ritual. Same pattern I guess: the more confident one usually wins. The best match I saw was a Korean against a Thai. The crowd had an almost ritualized cheering pattern for the Thai woman, who eventually won the hard-fought match.

We decided to find some ice-cream, and after awhile we found a Baskin Robbins in MBK Center . Then we stopped by a 7-11 close to the A-One Inn and bought some bottled water before going back to the room and crashing.